“... and she’s better-looking than Stuart. Last week at lunch, much of the Oscar talk focused on Gordon Wood, Professor of History at Brown. Wood is here on a year’s fellowship to write Volume IV of the new Oxford History of the United Sates, but he has also spent the odd moment reflecting on Matt Damon and Ben ...”

“... it (‘When Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about,’ Gordon Brown was still quipping in the LRB in 1989). The Leninists to the left of Labour, meanwhile, were looking at history as a ‘series of repeats’ – crisis, general strike, Winter Palace, here we come – although history suggests that the ...”

“... him goofily grinning or laughing; it was strange to see him without a smile. I remembered watching Gordon Brown at a press conference once while Tony Blair was PM, curious about what he would do with his face while Blair was taking questions, and I saw Farage was doing what Brown had: looking away from the other ...”

“... here and there with luminous accents. A painting from 1915 shows an angular white jug, a brown-striped teacup and what looks like a packet of butter arranged on a table. A stack of papers overlap at odd angles: a slender, russet-coloured book with a white label; a copy of Der Sturm, the avant-garde German magazine published between 1910 and 1932. The ...”

“... with Obama’s blessing, the last grisly details of what was already largely publicly known. Gordon Brown has been driven to announce that new standards will be set; but it is too little and it comes too late. To protect ourselves for the future, we need to know what has occurred in the past. We cannot do it on trust; investigations by the bodies ...”

“... been willing to gobble up their weaker brethren. ‘Longman’ is modern shorthand for Longman, Brown, Rees, Orme and Green; Routledge for Routledge, Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner. Chatto and Windus began in the 1870s as a partnership between Andrew Chatto who had drive, and W.E. Windus, a minor poet who had some capital. But the firm only took off with ...”

“... himself at home in the world’. In comparison with The Good Times, or even considered on its own, Gordon Legge’s Near Neighbours gave me the feeling of listening to a tone-deaf pianist plonking away, or of looking at pictures painted by numbers with the broadest brush. On the cover Duncan McLean makes a strenuous effort to enlist Legge in the brother and ...”

“... 30 April-1 May. To Essential Music in Great Chapel Street to record The Uncommon Reader, which Gordon House, former head of drama at BBC Radio, has adapted and is producing. What other readers are like I’ve no idea, but I always feel I am a sound editor’s nightmare, breaking off in the middle of a sentence to start again, redoing paragraphs when ...”

“... to put together an anthology of Parliamentary applications for Private Eye’s Order of the Brown Nose would stumble before long on an obsequious supplementary question from David Evans, one of the very first Tories to make a million out of privatisation (in his case from rubbish collection). Again and again, at Prime Minister’s Question Time, the ...”

“... of the rest of the beach. A series of miniature cliffs, islands and peninsulas, all made of dark brown stuff like clay, were moated around by channels and pools of icy water which the sea had left behind. This strange and incongruous sight was a piece of the distant past. The muddy outcrops offer an opportunity to visit a piece of a world lost thousands of ...”

“... converge, just opposite the modern parliament building, and for some miles downstream, the pale brown and blue waters run next to each other, unmixed. The site was chosen by Ismail Kamil ‘Pasha’, son of Muhammad Ali, khedive of Egypt, who had dispatched an army to conquer what is now Sudan. He also licensed a multinational band of freebooters to roam ...”

“... and foreign affairs an all-or-nothing struggle to the death. It has the politicians to do this. Gordon Brown’s conference speech was also a clarion call for progressive politics, but the inflexibility was all in his defence of the public services, and the adaptability was in his programme for African debt relief, where it must be possible to make ...”

“... in private, you tend to believe him. Blair, while still in Downing Street, on the prospects for Brown v. Cameron: Gordon ‘“can’t defeat Cameron” … Cameron had major strengths – a sense of political “timing”, a winning personality, and a natural ability to communicate and connect with people outside the ...”

“... you will occasionally have seen people half-clothed in filthy rags, hair matted with the red-brown dust thrown up from the laterite earth, wandering the streets largely unmolested; talking, perhaps, to themselves; begging sometimes; or scratching through rubbish heaps looking for something to eat. When I was a child in Kumasi we were taught to fear these ...”