“... quantitative rhythm. Here and there we could do with more bibliographical information. ‘Julian Brown deduces ...’, ‘Clausen says ...’ Where? And how do we find ‘Goold 1969’? The complex question of fact and fiction is passed over rather quickly. And because of the sparseness of the notes readers will be unaware that some of the interpretations ...”

“... got the plum jobs, and the opportunities to bring about reform. As a junior minister under George Brown at the Department of Economic Affairs in 1964-65, Crosland advocated the devaluation of sterling: but his opinion did not carry weight, and devaluation was postponed. His promotion to the job of Education Secretary gave him much more scope. His vision was ...”

“... cross in workshops, but we were in a literature class together, where the visiting professor, Richard Ellmann, had us read our own writing. I had a profound fear of public speaking, but when it was my turn, looking out over the classroom, I saw David and Heather’s faces smiling in encouragement. David in particular seemed like my own personal ...”

“... and reached the coast in time for lunch. For most of the journey, the scene was familiar: brown rice fields, villages of wood and tile, bridges over wide slow rivers. Once they had climbed into the hills, they passed more and more emergency vehicles, not only those of the police and fire services, but military trucks of the Japan Self-Defence ...”

“... by Christian pietism, idealist philosophy, particularly that of Schelling, the work of John Brown, the former pupil of Cullen who attempted to relate all diseases to states of over or under-excitation of the nervous system, and the example of English mad-doctors, for whose empirical method Heinroth had considerable respect: William Perfect ...”

“... Valley, East London would be unendurable. Victoria Park, the Lea, the Thames: tame country, old brown gods. They preserve our sanity. The Lea is nicely arranged – walk as far as you like then travel back to Liverpool Street from any one of the rural halts that mark your journey. Railway shadowing river, a fantasy conjunction; together they define an ...”

“... not said. Field Marshal Montgomery sounds lonely, wistful and odd; the twenty-year-old Cliff Richard sounds painfully young, schoolboyish and eager to please. By the 1970s, however, Plomley’s questioning had begun to seem creaky. To the growing frustration of a cohort of radio execs, he rebuffed all attempts to tweak the programme, and went on, Hendy ...”

“... the greatest novelty. In some respects it is a very odd compilation. Back in 1960 John Russell Brown wrote an article, celebrated in the trade, in which he argued against the value of old-spelling Shakespeare, saying among other things that the amount of ‘silent alteration’ an editor would have to introduce would make such a text almost useless for ...”

“... as in Sheffield, a Labour MP (Martin Flannery) married to a Communist wife, and a young engineer (Richard Caborn) who, doubtless under the patronage of his CP father and predecessor, began as a shop-stewards’ convenor at Firth Brown Tools at the age of 24, then modulated into a Kinnockite MP and, since 1997, government ...”

“... look at the picture for itself. Mme Redon was sitting in a background swirl of colours: old gold, brown, magenta, blue. Beneath her grave lectorial face was a sharply white jabot, itself the centre of the picture around which the colours played. These were sombre: Redon was concentrating unfrivolously on his wife just as she was concentrating on her book. And ...”

“... pressing if less explicit task is to remind herself of the person she is when not just being Mrs Richard Dalloway: ‘What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab.’ For a moment, wrapped in the sound and scent of the Bond Street flower shop, like the young Woolf caught up in the buzz and croon outside Talland House, she ...”

“... were all 3 in bed together wth her at one tyme’. The other half of the bail is posted by one Richard Meade, also of St Giles parish, whose occupation is given as ‘gardiner’. A few days later the procedure is repeated, and two other men stand surety for the fourth defendant, ‘ffrancisca Williams de whitechappell, spinster’. The designation ...”

“... built in the mid-16th century, as the ne plus ultra of aspirational timber framing. The carpenter, Richard Dale, whose name appears with that of the owner, William Moreton, on one of the windows, gave the framing a raking design which creates on the exterior an elaborate dazzle effect. Starting out with an H-plan house, Dale and Moreton added every latest ...”

“... a quick look at the new find and declared: ‘No great poet has appeared.’ At Cambridge, Sir Richard Jebb thought that while Bacchylides was no eagle, he ought to be praised as a lively nightingale. ‘Students,’ he added, ‘would find his poetry helpful in facilitating their approach to Pindar.’ Bacchylides had been compared with Pindar from the ...”

“... are a gang of reckless and clueless thugs enacting their 9/11 revenge fantasies on whatever brown-skinned men happen to be at hand. There have been 779 detainees at Guantánamo; of 517 men being held in 2005, 80 per cent had been handed over by Afghans and Pakistanis for $5000 bounties, resulting in not a few senseless detentions. Slahi recounts one of ...”