“... I remember how comedians only appeared in Film and Radio Fun long after their vogue had passed. Jack Warner with his catchphrase ‘Mind my bike’ and Joe E. Brown were known to me only as personalities from the comics not from the medium which had originally made them famous. I suppose this might be taken as an ...”

“... states, three more Warsaw Pact nations and Slovenia were added. Diplomats from George Kennan to Jack Matlock (Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union) and William Burns (later head of the CIA under Biden) all warned against extending Nato eastwards. They predicted that the siting of potential adversaries – perhaps eventually nuclear-armed ones – along ...”

“... a setting – just as Empson had prefigured – fit for her audience with a goddess. Pamela Brown, a statuesque student contralto, played Minerva.‘It is, I believe, the first time English royalty has been given the real old flattery for three hundred years,’ he told his publisher when requesting that the masque be included in his Collected ...”

“... is most often a man and the person assisted off this planet is customarily a woman. In May 1992 Dr Jack Kevorkian ‘helped’ a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis to die. He advocated suicide for her, gave her a ‘suicide consultation’, rigged up his special contraption and fitted on the mask she was to wear. It is evident that sick or aged women are ...”

“... financial sector had left Britain overexposed – in his Keynesian response to the crisis, Gordon Brown had pulled the economy back from the brink of disaster, even into modest growth by the time of the 2010 election. Labour had still gone into that campaign arguing that spending reductions would be necessary (largely at the insistence of ...”

“... and an English nationalist party that would fly the flag of St George, setting aside the Union Jack to await a future in which it might conceivably be recovered as the standard of a ‘United States of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland’. A few years before embarking on his brief bus tour, Goldring had tried to launch a weekly publication dedicated to ...”

“... becomes a series of rescue missions, staged opportunities for heroism worthy of Hollywood: mobs of brown-skinned extras look up to see helicopters – we are saved! The Americans have arrived! Such are the dreams that hover unarticulated in our political unconscious, allowing our leaders to redefine war as humanitarian intervention. The triumph of fantasy ...”

“... the Stage By Mr Theobald’. The 40-year-old Theobald was an attorney by training, and a literary jack-of-all-trades by profession, but his standing as a Shakespeare expert was high. The previous year he had published an impressive book, Shakespeare Restored, challenging what he saw as the errors and complacencies of Alexander Pope’s 1725 edition of the ...”

“... against, no, with, living with, existing alongside and part of,/the helter-skelter of rust brown, of swift indecipherables’. This is a vital part of the way Schuyler wanted – needed – to see the world, and himself within it. Watching the snowflakes from his window one Christmas Eve, he observed that ‘there’s a lot of twisting, turning, gusts ...”

“... box. When I get to the village I find that one of these pensioners was our ex-postman Maurice Brown. I ask him whether the Queen spoke to him. ‘No. She only stopped at people who had something wrong with them. I haven’t, so she just gave me the money.’29 March, Yorkshire. Easter Saturday and an appropriately monastic day out, going first via ...”

“... of reproach and supermarkets are running out of Argentinian beef. The Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, is accused of doing too much and doing too little. The questions surrounding the foot and mouth epidemic – where will it all end? how did it all start? – might be understood to accord with anxiety about every aspect of British agriculture today. The ...”

“... entertaining in their house in Merrion Square. Shaw remembered William Wilde ‘dressed in stuffy brown; and as he had the sort of skin that never even looks clean, he produced a dramatic effect beside Lady Wilde (in full fig) if being, like Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and Evil.’ Harry Furniss wrote ...”

“... I am on you. Cimmie: Went to lunch at Maryland today, found Princess Louise, Lady Londesburgh, Jack Wilson ... I tried desperately hard to be friendly and gay. It was the fashion in the Mosleys’ circle for husbands to try to get off with other people’s wives: this was another of the ‘rules of the game’ to which Nicholas Mosley’s title ...”

“... by the faction currently in charge of the Labour Party. Ada Salter refused to fly the Union Jack from the town hall, preferring a red flag blazoned with local emblems; Alfred declared they were ‘out to abolish the working classes as such and create a classless society. That is what we mean by socialism.’ The Times declared him an extremist.The ...”

“... group, now at the top of the New York avant-garde art world,’ Melvyn Bragg explains, blunt brown sideburns toning nicely with his blunt brown tie. A bit later he addresses Acker directly. ‘You talk in your books about doing away with meaning. What do you mean by that, more precisely?’ She smiles.For this ...”