“... scheme would cost an extra £9.8 to £16.4 billion, less than changes made to the tax system by Gordon Brown and George Osborne. Andy Stern suggests a form of UBI giving every American adult $1000 a month, at a cost of $2.7 trillion, to be paid for by getting rid of existing programmes, cutting tax breaks (which cost $1.2 trillion), reducing defence ...”

“... you weren’t ruthless enough.’ When Eden offered him the Exchequer, Macmillan did a Gordon Brown: insisting that ‘as chancellor, I must be undisputed head of the home front, under you’ and that there could be no question of his predecessor, Butler, being accorded the title of deputy prime minister. Barely a year later, after the Suez ...”

“... of egalitarianism. But the special contribution of such Catholic writers as Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy is absent. Percy in particular was no less hostile than Genovese himself to social engineering, country-club greed, cultural tawdriness and hedonistic hippiedom. Finally, he barely refers to any contemporary political ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tall gaunt hatless youth’ with ‘prominent face bones and a streak of sticky-looking brown hair falling across his forehead’ – and Mrs Hopewell invites him to dinner. Joy (who in order to wind up her mother has changed her legal name to Hulga) decides to seduce him, but when they go up to the hayloft together, he steals her wooden ...”

“... 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 ...”