“... 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 ...”

“... HBOS, after its boss, Victor Blank – this is the part you couldn’t make up – bumped into Gordon Brown at a drinks party and got him to give an assurance that a takeover would not be referred to the monopolies commission. Most of us have had a few drinks at a party and done something embarrassing, usually along the lines of ...”

“... made her debut in 1894 in the first volume of The Yellow Book). The top floors of their house in Gordon Street would soon register another offence against propriety: lodgers. This necessary evil just about kept heads up as the family was on the way down; mother and sisters removed themselves to the basement, from where Mew wrote to a friend that ‘our ...”

“... In due course, when the Tories recover their nerve and the state of the economy starts to place Gordon Brown’s reputation under pressure, the argument will move on to tax. It is worth considering what then will be the price of the triangulations of the Blair years, the abandonment of principle, the remorseless pragmatism, the cynical disregard for ...”

“... prime minister James Callaghan commissioned a modernist house on Montpelier Row from Ursula and Gordon Bowyer (Ursula, who died this year at 99, was like Moro a German Jewish émigré), residents of nearby Maze Hill. The project involved two connected houses, one of which was sold, and one of which was occupied by Callaghan and his family from 1958. It is ...”

“... through Facebook accounts, until a second message told me he had swapped his father’s surname, Brown, for his mother’s, Lindsay. I typed in ‘William Lindsay’ and there he was: a boy in a EA7 bomber jacket with headphones round his neck, flaming hair and a lopsided smile.When I got back to Glasgow, I learned why my contact had risked his job to give ...”