“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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; ...”

“... beginning British commanders had just eight transport helicopters, the big twin-rotor Chinooks. Gordon Brown was attacked in the British press for cutting back on earlier plans to buy more. In fact, Brown was responsible for telling the MoD how much it had to spend overall; the decision to cut helicopter expansion ...”

“... classroom? Have you ever noticed how most museum-goers don’t stop in front of Picasso’s dense, brown-hued Cubist masterpieces of 1911-12? Is Ellington’s accessibility compromised by puzzlement at the band’s idiosyncratic jungle sounds?The Jungle Band’s most extraordinary sounds were produced by the trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams (who ...”

“... William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of Italian Fascism Douglas Stephen, architect of a ‘Dan Dare mini-skyscraper’ in Swindon, or the South London aesthete Sextus Dyball, designer of ...”

“... Over eight pages she dismissed the scheme as an alienating, self-consciously futuristic ‘Flash Gordon job’. She begged her father to build something instead that ‘expresses the best of the society in which you live, and at the same time your hopes for the betterment of this society’.Bronfman, keen to have his strong-willed daughter back from ...”

“... though Pevsner said nothing about Furry Day at Helston or Baring-Gould’s amusing accident on Brown Willy, he had an impressive range of reference and ‘sees what nobody has really bothered to look at for centuries’: the church monuments by forgotten sculptors which, ‘ranged together’, brought their authors to life as artistic personalities; the ...”

“... ever swept away’. Under Storm’s Wing should be read alongside Thomas’s insecure Letters to Gordon Bottomley – just as his poetry requires its full literary-historical context. Last year the Thomas marriage suffered trial by LRB letter-page. John Pikoulis accused Jonathan Barker of editorially fudging his contentions that ‘the breach between ...”

“... that credit for Labour’s economic record and therefore electoral success has largely been due. Brown, indeed, had no choice, if he was not to be branded as disloyal to the party, but to help Blair into a third term of office by loosening the purse-strings to an extent that he might not otherwise have thought it prudent to do. A more effective parliamentary ...”

“... through the ruins of a captured city. It was in that moment I realised the game was up for Gordon Brown: he doesn’t stroll, he doesn’t do hands-in-pockets. He doesn’t drop in on Hackney Wick, he hits Washington like Livingstone (David) in darkest Africa. Gill’s arrest came when he persisted in recording the hustling convoys of lorries ...”

“... of unionist tradition. Only in the 1970s would this harden into Thatcher’s and, later, Brown’s caricatures of Britishness. Kidd tends to ascribe these traits to Scottish reasonableness, a willingness to compromise that preceded the rise of the tougher political nationalism of today’s SNP. This may endear his book to defenders of Brownite or ...”

“... endless work to be done in the field of electronic music. And many people at work: David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, to name five. And in the field of video and visual technology (composers also have eyes): Lowell Cross, Tony Martin, Nam June Paik, to name three. And in the field of computer music (shortly ...”

“... On his release from jail, Gordon Liddy, the Watergate conspirator, set up as a radio guru, with a nationally syndicated show dispensing cracker barrel philosophy and a folksy view of the world. A few years ago, I found myself a guest on the show as part of a tour to promote a book I had written on the long history of life on Earth ...”

“... put it, ‘a feminine no-shovel potter’. She used an electric kiln, which was anathema to the brown-pot brigade. At first she was disconcerted by the Leach ethos, but after a few experiments in that direction she regained her balance. Later, she won Leach round. Always a man’s woman, she made him into a close friend and an occasional lover. Rie ...”