“... he moved badly; he was no athlete, hated having to get up on a horse, and had, according to Ivor Brown, ‘the most meaningless legs imaginable’. He had to conquer, and succeeded completely in doing so, his early tendency to shyness, self-consciousness and laziness. He was proud of his voice, perhaps occasionally too much in love with it, especially in ...”

“... during Burl’s excavation and the stone bank was rebuilt. Visitors are now directed to it by a brown ‘heritage’ sign and, Stone Circles tells us, there is a convenient car park with picnic table.Strichen’s story is not atypical. The appreciation and understanding of stone circles hasn’t been a linear process. For every advance there have been ...”

“... the battle of Omdurman, the infamous rout of 1898, enacted as revenge for the death of General Gordon, when Kitchener’s troops killed at least ten thousand Sudanese soldiers, with the loss of only 48 Britons. Morris tells us that the Mahdist army was efficiently annihilated (‘It all went like very slow clockwork’), but says nothing about the ...”

“... across the sea-loch with its stealthy, dipping flight and the ride fills nearly full, buoying the brown tangles of the seaweed, I can see time pouring in a transparent flux, across the sounds and the uplands, bearing the people away to America, lifting the houses like flotsam and dropping them near a different ferry-port, a different plot of land. Only it ...”

“... are born. Are we really free? Or is free-will and responsibility an illusion? In July 1978, Louise Brown precipitated and focused some of these concerns. She was born after an entirely normal pregnancy, but from a conception that took place in a laboratory dish. Moral or not? Legal or not? Playing God? Her existence was made possible by the work of Patrick ...”

“... many of them privatised – are what I see. On the far side of Roman Road are the barracks-style brown brick walkways of the Greenways estate, built in the 1950s, solid and unremarkable, renovated not long ago, providing homes for hundreds; beyond them, its crown poking up beyond the Greenways roof, is Denys Lasdun’s listed Sulkin House, built on the site ...”

“... is the collection now housed in Amherst.) Dickinson, Bingham explains, wrote on backs of brown-paper bags or of discarded bills, programmes, and invitations; on tiny scraps of stationery pinned together; on leaves torn from old notebooks (one such sheet dated ‘1824’); on soiled and mildewed subscription blanks, or on department or drug-store ...”

“... and the bottom line? In fact, as Leys and Player show, it was the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that began replacing the public components of the NHS with private ones, the effect concealed by large spending increases, long before Lansley and Cameron took charge. If the Conservatives and their Liberal allies are dismantling the NHS, it was ...”

“... other things, as a reminder of the attitudes of many in the West to the suffering of black and brown people. Implicitly and explicitly, politicians and commentators have made clear their disparagement, their ignorance, their casual cultural supremacy. ‘This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for ...”

“... father more than her mother. She studied at the Slade under the all-powerful trinity of Frederick Brown, Wilson Steer and Tonks. It was 1910, and the students were advised not to attend Roger Fry’s Post-Expressionist exhibition. By 1914 Carrington, a mild bohemian, had cut her hair short, Mark Gertler and C.W. Nevinson were in love with her, and the world ...”

“... and the other never really bothered to roll the dice. Lipsyte, now 51 years old, graduated from Brown at a time when theory reigned; he came of age in the 1990s, the decade when the figure of the slacker slouched through the zeitgeist. His early stories – which became his first book, the story collection Venus Drive (2000) – were published by Open ...”

“... a stranded European tourist: ‘she was pale, with a soft plain face, a full mouth, and cropped brown hair.’ Already we know more about this woman’s appearance than we do about Jill’s: a hint that when given the chance, the narrator will send Jill off alone on the next plane. Before he does, the couple see the woman at dinner at their ...”

“... court at Bow Street was on the ground floor of the Fieldings’ house and across the road from the Brown Bear, which became, as Beattie puts it, ‘a lock-up as well as a hang-out’ for the runners. They were expected to be ready to act at very short notice and most of them lived very near the court in the streets around Covent Garden, but hung out, when on ...”

“... played Miss Marple’, is present. Also namechecked are Patricia Hodge, Simon Russell Beale, Giles Gordon (once Moorcock’s literary agent), Andrea Dworkin and Iris Murdoch, who ‘sat smiling into the middle-distance while Felix Martin explained the H-bomb to her’. What Moorcock is doing, under the permission of a work of fiction, is contriving a ...”

“... married Churchill some thought that Venetia and Winston might make a match. She had long brown hair, a deep plummy voice, and was later said by Isaiah Berlin, who met her in Cambridge in the 1930s, to be a ‘handsome, smart, awful woman’. Whatever Venetia’s other callings – in middle age she took up aviation, and she had a passion for keeping ...”