“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”

“... just need to have the money, the equivalent of three dollars for a dose of ‘Mexican Mud’, a brown, poorly refined paste that quickly clogs needles and veins. People shoot up everywhere, in the picaderos – squats run by drug dealers, where entry is five pesos – and in houses, often with family. Pancho is a 26-year-old who when he isn’t too wasted ...”

“... treason episode. The casting out of the drunken soldier from the garden. Let them have it. Even Bill Brandt in his portrait for Literary Britain could manage no more than an unconvinced section of cottage wall. Winter roses, not notably sick, masked the heritage tag. Ackroyd’s yellow sands were not in evidence. A holiday camp to the right and a ...”

“... was a substantial amount of anger at having to be grateful, the gratitude ever increasing, the bill never settled, and made more enraging by Doris’s insistence that I wasn’t to feel it. Also anger at the discomfort I felt trying to live invisibly in an unfamiliar house with someone I didn’t know, at having to relax when I couldn’t, at having to be ...”

“... properly have been abed;/But sure enough she wasn’t there/Lying awake with her wide brown stare.’ Properly or improperly, she is always elsewhere, even when she’s fetched home and locked in. ‘In Nunhead Cemetery’ returns to the place where Mew’s brother Henry was buried, but in disguise; the poem is spoken at the graveside of a former ...”

“... years later Wertham was called as an expert witness for the NAACP in one of the cases reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. With the evidence of his experiences treating traumatised children in Harlem, he persuaded a federal judge that school segregation was a danger to public health.Unfortunately for Wertham’s reputation, his work with children also ...”

“... in, had remarkable success between 2015 and 2018 in mobilising direct action against Germany’s brown coal mines and smoke-belching power stations. But the movement suffered a serious setback when the Merkel government stitched up a deal with the coal industry and trade unions to delay the exit from coal until 2038, a ridiculous horizon entirely out of line ...”

“... she then cooks and offers to the detectives when they come looking for the murder weapon. Father Brown would have loved it, though like most of Dahl’s stories it has the emotional boniness of a shaggy dog story: it rests on a sharp punchline, but there is no love for or between the people in it. The tales from this period generally conclude with a snappy ...”

“... The hair surrounding his bald skull had grown nearly gray. Zygmunt Salkin had a head of curly brown hair. He wore a blue suit with red stripes, a shirt of a similar pattern and a gaudy tie. He spoke an old-home Yiddish without the English words employed by the American tourists I had encountered in Warsaw. Still, I could determine from his speech that he ...”

“... clarity of fine enamel; pale blue of sea and sky, the russet of dead bracken and fern, deep purple brown of unbudded birch, and the paler violets of the Skye hills and the peaks of Rum’. Already, the book was sending me to the window, to the cottage door, to see these West Highland colours for myself, see them better. But then there comes a passage in ...”

“... and a reproduced Camel cigarette packet: ‘from use’. The full works – chocolate-brown cloth, Brainard dustwrapper, author photo (flat cap, jeans, sandals, thumbs-hooked-in-belt) – yours for £1.50. Shamefully good value. You owed it to the poet to make a decent fist of reading the thing. Now, in an era of cut-throat discounts, peel-away ...”

“... had an income. When he came of age in 1855, he began drawing an annuity of £900. His father, a bill broker turned gentleman who bought his own coat of arms, had died in 1847, leaving the family his mining investments. Although Hanson follows fashion in presenting Morris as an icon of the ecohumanities – the prophet of Extinction Rebellion rather than the ...”

“... of the first half of this decade, writers as diverse in talent and sensibility as Rebecca Brown, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana and Sarah Schulman, writers whose main similarity seemed to be that they all started out at small presses before being ‘discovered’ by big houses.By now – by which I mean, in the most Nixonian sense of the ...”

“... of the Late Victorian literary and artistic worlds: his maternal grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, his uncle William Michael Rossetti. The only possible career for the children of these classes was that of a genius. Ford’s Rossetti cousins had written Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen respectively. It became his duty always to aspire ...”

“... bag. It was the skull I wanted, a sculptural form, the sightless sockets and that great piercing bill. I could picture it mounted in a glass box, and hung on the wall; or, better, displayed on the low table here in my study. Phil, my husband, had made the table from a huge piece of oak he hauled out of the firth. Two hefty, deeply weathered supports were ...”