“... 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 ...”

“... that he would ‘like to meet soon. There is much I would like to talk about, with you.’ When Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007, he invited Thatcher to Downing Street and greeted her warmly at the front door. By this point her health was poor and some criticised Brown’s gesture as exploitative of a sick ...”

“... passenger-list which includes Dante is framed in Prufrockian mannerisms: I recognised them all: Gordon Pym, Jerome the stoker, who never uttered a word, Miss Taussig, Guggenheim (copper and tin), Engels (textile), Ilmari Alhomaki, Dante – I was cold and afraid. This is the prescribed Anglo-Laforguian way of glimpsing the Eternal Footman (‘And in ...”

“... they couldn’t avoid their oppressors. As Baldwin wrote in ‘Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown’, the ‘bitterness’ of the African in Paris was ‘unlike that of his American kinsman’, because ‘the African Negro’s status, conspicuous and subtly inconvenient, is that of a colonial; and he leads here the intangibly precarious life of someone ...”

“... Blairites were famously relaxed about people either making pots of money or having fun with it (Gordon Brown was another story). The members of Budd’s commission included the political philosopher Jonathan Wolff and the sports journalist Mihir Bose. The report they produced in 2001, for the newly created Department for Culture, Media and Sport, was ...”

“... set up in the prison and reporters were invited in to see her vote. Wearing a grey raincoat and a brown cloth cap, clutching a bunch of daffodils which a family friend had given her, she explained how she wasn’t looking her best. ‘No pictures, please! Not today,’ she said like an ageing film star. In fact, Mrs Hoxha had no intention of voting, even ...”

“... they had grown up with Charlotte and knew the unpleasant secrets of the Mews’ new home at 9 Gordon Street. By 1888 the eldest son, Henry, and the youngest daughter, Freda, were both incurably insane. Both had to be confined, Henry with his own nurse in Peckham Hospital, Freda in the Carisbrooke Mental Home on the Isle of Wight, the town which Charlotte ...”

“... later is a downright delight. The angry and abusive restaurateur is still with us, as Craig Brown points out in his excellent short introduction, but John Fothergill, for all his eccentricities, snobberies and potty obsessions, had an endearing quality lacking in today’s kitchen boors; and for me this aspect was strongly confirmed by a rereading of ...”

“... of silicate minerals with a fibrous structure. Chrysotile, amosite and crocidolite – white, brown and blue asbestos – are the most common varieties. Its remarkable insulating and fire-resistant properties have been known for millennia, but asbestos only began to be used on an industrial scale in the last quarter of the 19th century. Large-scale mining ...”

“... this case was a desperate State Department – with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and Gordon Brown as the blushing bridesmaid – fearful that if it did not push this through both parties might soon be too old for recycling. The bride was certainly in a hurry, the groom less so. Brokers from both sides engaged in lengthy negotiations on the ...”

“... her. Other chapters detail the fate of Betty LaFrance’s second hit man, Doc. Finally there is Gordon Hauser, a PhD dropout who teaches high-school equivalency classes at the prison. As the sole character in the book who is not locked up, the chapters about Hauser are a window out of the novel’s confinement. He’s a man, one of the very few in the ...”

“... from song-thrush and cuckoo which I heard only. The ground was peopled by their nests and eggs: brown-blotched seagreen of a black-backed gull inside the circular foundation of a ruined cairn; black-spotted brown of a snipe, which fled away in zig-zags when I went for an early morning wash in the burn; ...”