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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance with prudence has since become so common that Christie’s have now suspended credit card payments altogether.6 ...”

“... responsible. The Suez Canal, according to a recent history of the WHO by Marcos Cueto, Theodore Brown and Elizabeth Fee, made Europeans feel ‘dangerously close to India’.† In 1900 the fear was the imminent completion of a railway line linking Berlin to Mecca, seen as a cholera hotbed.Cholera, which returned to Europe repeatedly during the 19th ...”

“... Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about,’ Gordon Brown was still quipping in the LRB in 1989). The Leninists to the left of Labour, meanwhile, were looking at history as a ‘series of repeats’ – crisis, general strike, Winter Palace, here we come – although history suggests that the ‘sharpening of ...”

“... Sister Josepha showed me some old registers and school photographs of Anthony. His hair was light brown and the headmistress remembered the way he suddenly just burst out of his shell and became popular. ‘But he wasn’t the sort of boy you had to check,’ she said. Listening to her talk of her fears about Iraq and compare the loss of young men to the ...”

“... corner of the mouth or held in the hand in such a way that the smoke would turn his fingers oak-brown, the felt hat, dark shirt and light tie, which gave him a gangsterish appearance, though more Guys and Dolls Runyonesque than High Sierra Bogartian. I knew, too, that he was queer (the term ‘gay’ wasn’t used then), though I can’t recall just how ...”

“... the inauguration of the Iritty Bridge in Kerala in 1933. Even at that late date, there isn’t a brown face to be seen among the triumphant engineers in their trilbies and topis and the ladies in their long frocks. These magnificent feats were a fine way of maintaining full employment in Glasgow, Newcastle and Preston, not so hot for Bombay and ...”

“... revivalist zeal. Shortly after Trump’s victory, Third Way, a think tank run by a former aide to Bill Clinton, launched New Blue, a $20 million initiative to recharge the vital centre. In April it was revealed that billionaires have been funding Patriots and Pragmatists, a private discussion group of pundits affiliated with the Obama and Bush ...”