“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”