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“... to the evidence of three people who worked in or close to Intelligence in the mid-Seventies – Peter Wright, Cathy Massiter and Colin Wallace – a substantial section of MI5 was working almost full time to disorientate the office, and subvert the political achievements, of Prime Minister Wilson, allegedly the one man in the country who could control ...”

“... the Vegan refused. Later she said: ‘Carmen, I hope your sister wasn’t offended but I only eat brown bread.’ Just before lunch the person who had the sex change was at the nurse’s desk in a flimsy blue nightdress, asking if she could wash her hair. But there’s still no hot water. The nurse was calling her Caroline. She looked very excited about her ...”

“... promising to correct it. Perhaps name changes are of more general interest. In Decline and Fall Peter Chetwynde started without a Best and Dr Benito, the press secretary in Scoop, was originally Bonham Carter Jackson. Brideshead is much altered. Charles Ryder began as Peter Fenwick and was then in Debrett, the second son ...”

“... Then in Leviathan, published some years later, Auster uses the same initials for the narrator, Peter Aaron; and anagrammatic sleight of hand (Delia/Lydia, Iris/Siri: Auster’s real-life loves past and present) further blurs the boundaries between his facts and his fictions. So one approaches his openly autobiographical Hand to Mouth with ...”

“... years later by Chesterton, who assimilated the theological to the criminal in the tales of Father Brown. ‘Chesterton always performs the tour de force of proposing a supernatural explanation [for a crime] and then replacing it, losing nothing, with another one from this world,’ wrote Borges, another master of otherworldly propositions, who once related ...”

“... against a sailor who finds that he is, in the words of Bernard Frechtmann’s translation, ‘a brown hatter’. But in his third novel, Pompes Funèbres, written in 1947, the oppostions are, as Peter Coe points out in his excellent 1968 study of Genet, beginning to show worrying signs of being out of control. In Pompes ...”

“... When he reads a damaging leak on New Year’s Day about his relationship with the then coach Peter Moores, it confirms his feeling that the cosmic order is against him. ‘Happy New Year, KP,’ he tells himself. ‘Look, it’s raining shit outside.’ Pietersen’s book is frequently coupled with the new one by Roy Keane, another inveterate ...”

“... twirl around and go on to the next one and twirl and then the next one. I was so fucking tired of brown paintings.’ There came, however, a release from the weight of things already done: ‘suddenly there’s a huge chunk you don’t have to deal with any more.’ Europe also gave him the experience of solitude: ‘what was happening was that I was pulling ...”

“... Immaculately dressed in a jacket and scarf and his famous white trousers, always carrying a small brown suitcase, Bender charms, bullshits and blags his way across the USSR, refusing to play by the rules. Arriving in a provincial town he persuades the locals he is a chess grandmaster who will make their town the chess capital of the world, then the capital of ...”

“... has been accepted by every chancellor since Butler succeeded Gaitskell in 1951. And when Brown succeeded Clarke in 1997, the point was even more decisively entrenched. Responsibility for setting the base rate became the task of an independent Monetary Policy Committee, charged with keeping inflation within a specified range, through symmetrical ...”

“... content and action. One question was: when did all this prudery begin? Thanks to the work of E.K. Brown, M. Jaeger and M.J. Quinlan, historians since the Forties have accepted that the austere ideology of ‘Victorianism’ was already in place among the middle classes, as well as the poor, by 1800. There is no way around the fact that the novels of Jane ...”

“... own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding wasn’t a soul singer yet. Billed as Otis ‘Rockin’ Redding or ‘Rockhouse Redding’, he sang rock and roll and remained heavily indebted to Little Richard. Bouncing around with Jenkins, who had ...”

“... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...”

“... British polity. To celebrate the launching of the Institute of Contemporary British History, Peter Hennessy and Anthony Sheldon have edited an engaging collection of essays on post-war British governments, starting with Paul Addison on the wartime background to Attlee’s success, and ending with some surprisingly detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher ...”

“... in The Art of Edward Thomas open out the issues, but a whiff of poet’s corner lingers on. Pace Peter Levi, it is not quite enough to celebrate Thomas as ‘certainly genuine, authentic, a true poet’. Under Storm’s Wing is a welcome reprint of Helen Thomas’s As it was and World without End, first published in 1926 and 1931. It also contains a ...”