“... to be taken out on a lake and killed, on Michael’s orders. Both of the first movies (shot by Gordon Willis) look wonderful: interiors full of gold and brown, shady characters caught in the half-light, murmuring in corridors; glittering exteriors, all sunlight and celebration, songs, christenings, weddings, crowds. The ...”

“... 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. It takes me so long because I fret and fret,’ he wrote to his friend the poet Gordon Bottomley in 1906: ‘My self-criticism or rather my studied self-contempt is now nearly a disease.’ Finally in 1913 he meets Robert Frost, newly arrived from America, starts writing poetry and joins the army, to die four years later in combat in ...”

“... of their healthy first-preference vote, the widespread popularity of their Tasmanian leader, Bob Brown, and their prominence in the electoral campaign, they are absent from the House of Representatives. So are the Democrats (equivalent to the Lib Dems). As commentators have emphasised, the results bestow absolute power on the prime minister – a ...”

“... distance between the memory and the writing; the trick, she told her friend the novelist Caroline Gordon, was to write about yourself as if you were writing about someone else. But much of her fiction grew out of memories: ‘Without warning, plain and clear in its true colours as if she looked through a frame upon a scene that had not stirred nor changed ...”

“... as the basis of urban planning in Europe; on the other side were Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, who embraced the commercial strip (‘billboards are almost all right,’ they proclaimed in 1972 in Learning from Las Vegas, a manifesto to which Delirious New York is an indirect riposte). Koolhaas could reject the reactionary ...”

“... now usually called ‘faith’ schools, and a new type of school, the city academy. Of the two, Gordon Brown’s government is clearly putting its money on the academies. The faith schools were a particular enthusiasm of Blair’s but are viewed with suspicion by the Labour Party as a whole. Their admirers believe they have an ‘ethos’ and an ...”

“... the case of Smethwick, he had been robbed of the Parliamentary presence of the tenth-rate Patrick Gordon Walker, who he wished to make Foreign Secretary in preference to the even more hideous George Brown, and was thus subjected to the vast annoyance of a by-election which he went on to mishandle badly. In the case of the ...”

“... 17 years in the Army (Bodmin, India, Burmah, India, Burmah, Malta, Gibraltar, Soudan – relief of Gordon – and Transvaal): says that a bus driver could write a “reel ’istory” of the things he sees from his box seat.’ Of a waitress in 1904: ‘Hours 3 to 6.30, but has to stop late if people come: wears dress that cost £6, belongs to proprietor, but ...”

“... churning up dust. In vast, windowless sheds specialising in Logistics. In geometric stacks of red, brown and blue containers: HAMBURG SÜD, HANJIN, MOL. Like a monumental Paul Klee hammered out in steel. In Thatcher’s day it seemed a ground-level manifestation of what I took to be her vision of enterprise: deranged scams, small businesses wiped out. And the ...”

“... check) and a gorgeous pale tweed sports jacket, dotted with tiny delicate flecks of brown and black. He held his alto gently in the crook of one arm. He smiled faintly at me – a low-rent Lucifer – and was humming quietly. You’d be so – o – o – o – nice – to come home to! He reminded me at once of those hunky young hard-drinking ...”

“... the only representative of softness and warmth in sight.Atticus’s father, the celebrated editor Gordon Lish, specialised in cutting Raymond Carver’s stories, sometimes ending them thousands of words earlier than originally written. Eloquent truncation, with the implications left to reverberate, can be a very powerful effect. There were traces of Carver in ...”

“... cream-coloured leather armchair, in a carefully designed room decorated in white, beige and brown, enhanced by the candy pink of what look like balls of straw stacked up in large vases, he speaks calmly, without raising his voice, in impeccable English. ‘The autonomous government gave money for the returnees, 40 million Sudanese pounds [about nine ...”

“... 200th birthday was Claire Harman’s Life, the first serious new biography since Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life in 1994 and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës from the same year (biographies seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës now benefit from Margaret Smith’s magisterial – much overdue ...”

“... subtle array, this … motile configuration’ of ‘grey in grey’. Gillian, to my memory, wore brown on brown, a thin brown polo-neck with a brownish waistcoat and some sort of brown and ordinary boots and skirt. Her hair was long and fair and ...”

“... 1969 and the moment when real money, the paper kind that came with a few silver coins in a small brown envelope, disappeared. For ever. I had a casual labouring job, unloading containers and stacking trucks and vans in muddy sheds alongside the railway in Stratford. Chobham Farm, Angel Lane, Stratford East: a wonderful bucolic address, backed up by a ...”