“... A boyish 41-year-old, casually smart in a floppy double-breasted suit of indeterminate adman brown, he didn’t look like the devil at all and kept asking me if I minded when he stubbed his cigarettes out in my saucer. Of course I minded. But I wasn’t about to say so, not there, not then. For I was drunk at the time – on the heady alcohol of modern ...”

“... suggests that Selous, an old Rugbcian, deliberately created an authorial personality to recall Tom Brown: ‘honest, modest, brave, and enlivened’ by an innocent love of mischief. She drily adds: ‘Of his modesty, it may be said that though everyone remarked on his reluctance to talk about himself, it is not recorded that anyone ever failed to get him to do ...”

“... and distributed by a state organisation with a no-nonsense Attlee-era moniker, redolent of brown paper envelopes and blotched stencils and corridors smelling of disinfectant: the Central Electricity Generating Board, the CEGB. Littlechild suggested splitting the National Grid off from the power-generating side of the CEGB, privatising regional ...”

“... on how political elites have handled extraneous challenges. Another of the volume’s editors, Gordon Pentland, has a sophisticated chapter on parliamentary reform; David Craig and Jeremy Nuttall write with great skill about political ideas; and Angus Hawkins and Steven Fielding consider parties and high politics. There is now a good deal of detailed ...”

“... in a town like that, but Wootton Bassett is out on its own. Today, there are two subjects: first, Gordon Brown’s letter to the mother of a dead soldier, Grenadier Guardsman Jamie Janes, in which the prime minister misspelled the serviceman’s name; and two, the news that £47 million has been made available for Ministry of Defence staff bonuses. Up ...”

“... and scribbler Henri de Monfreid was himself a habitué of the region. His house stands in rolling brown hills about an hour out of Harar (half the journey in a 4×4 and half on the bony chestnut nag which seemed a rather safer bet than the makeshift little buggies which the French contingent referred to as cabriolets). It is an ...”

“... of Mandelson is a consequence of his trade unionism and his friendship with Charlie Whelan, Gordon Brown’s former press officer. The Chancellor might appear to outsiders as the willing servant of a free-market consensus which has cracked in those parts of the world – roughly one-third – currently in recession and worse, but to Routledge and ...”

“... You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free is the vernacular confession of Jeremiah Brown, a 34-year-old Glaswegian exile. After 12 years in America, Jerry is coming home. His mother, whom he hasn’t seen for eight years, is ill, and in any case he could use a change of scenery, if only to break a streak of lousy luck. He has been struggling to ...”

“... in the national consciousness but never quite join together as a narrative. It was here that Gordon Brown had his fateful encounter with Gillian Duffy, whom he was recorded calling a ‘bigoted woman’ during the 2010 election campaign. It was here that organised groups of men sexually abused young teenage girls, whose complaints were initially ...”

“... it ought to know.What exactly inspired the writers, two little-known journalists called Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard (an ancestor of Hugh Trenchard, founder of the Royal Air Force)? For all the exhaustive textual discussion of Cato’s letters, Dabhoiwala concludes that this remains ‘an unexplored puzzle’. At all events, the letters went ...”

“... in Her Letters and Journals (‘a Reticence in three volumes’, Gladstone called it), and some in Gordon Haight’s magisterial work as editor and biographer. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston have now provided a very welcome and complete edition of all the diaries and journals, covering the years between Eliot’s union with Lewes in 1854, when she was ...”

“... factual piece about the city’s rat population, ‘The Rats on the Waterfront’, he writes: The brown rat is an omnivorous scavenger, and it doesn’t seem to care at all whether its food is fresh or spoiled. It will eat soap, oil paints, shoe leather, the bone of a bone-handled knife, the glue in a book binding, and the rubber in the insulation of ...”

“... something else, a postcard sent in August 1915 by my father’s uncle, Brigadier-General Gordon Geddes RFA, to his brother-in-law, telling him that Bob had arrived safely. I discovered, online, that Geddes kept a war ‘diary’, which was (with some 150 others) housed at the Royal Artillery archives in Woolwich. My great-uncle was in France from ...”

“... to the Ashton ballet Apparitions (for which Lambert merely chose the late Liszt piano pieces for Gordon Jacob to orchestrate), as he does to Horoscope. He quotes in extenso a long programme note by Rubbra on Summer’s Last Will, as if to excuse himself from the task. And he remorselessly lists composers and performers and repertoire in concerts and ballet ...”

“... There was much light and much wind. In summer gorse fires threw up dense billowing columns of brown smoke, broken by bursts of orange flame. The fire engines came, another patch of blackened hillside was born, but the houses seemed to withstand it – the thin, dry furze must have flared up and then quickly died down. When my parents gardened on the steep ...”