“... purposes – had become the phrase du jour.Still, Brzezinski and the secretary of defence, Harold Brown, his closest ally in the administration, had a problem. Not only was the European public becoming more outspokenly opposed to nuclear weapons, but, as Luce writes, ‘Carter’s heart seemed to be with the protesters.’ Under pressure from transatlantic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bones’ and he was ‘incessantly smoking cigarettes, the long fingers straying to the straggling brown moustache’. Crane smoked as if cigarettes alone were keeping him alive. ‘He could not talk,’ a niece wrote, ‘unless he was walking up and down the room with his hands stuffed into his pockets and a cigarette balanced on his lips.’ It is this niece ...”

“... until someone told her that ‘colour’ meant skin colour not hair. She stopped writing ‘brown’, started writing ‘white’, and immediately got a job. In 1939 she was selling tweeds in the Merrie England Village at the New York World’s Fair; she would never settle permanently in England again. For a natural rebel, emigration has ...”

“... hiding. By adopting the persona of a fanatical Tory High Churchman, he scuppered the passage of a Bill outlawing occasional conformity. The Government was angry at Defoe, who in Novak’s phrase ‘slipped over the edge of the abyss’, and it announced a reward of £50 for the apprehension of ‘Daniel de Fooe’, the author of a ‘scandalous and ...”

“... or pools, each named after an Ovidian legend of loss of love; the second is a brown pool in a torrential stream between steep English hillsides. The sequence, recording ‘Epiphanies all around us Always perhaps’, in a sense finds no answer to its opening question: ‘And what’s to be made of that?’ Any sense of answer or ...”

“... patter – , and, contradicting her, the vicar, a timid man (large Adam’s apple), with a brown-eyed, canine squint, chokes upon a nervous cough. 3 Tea stronger than a Munich beer. In the room the air is hazy. In the hearth a flamelet lazy gleams, like a butterfly on boulders. I’ve overstayed – it’s time to go now … I rise; a nod, and then ...”

“... NHS glasses and studiously just-fell-out-of-bed hair. Damon Albarn tries to do a bit of a Pinkie Brown psych-ward glare but it’s pitiable – a strong breeze would knock him over. And is that shirt unironed? Mod! You mugging me off? It’s four art-school herberts leaning against a car that’s not their own in a world that’s not their own, that refers ...”

“... Allowance, or – if you prefer – you could use it to pay for the BBC and throw in the wage bill of the Royal Navy. Unfortunately, Oxera’s method involved questionable assumptions about interest rates and the exact nature of the put option, and further analysis by economists at the Bank of England suggests that the true value of the option (and ...”

“... complex jostling over the rules. In the months leading up to the eventual signing of the bill by President Bush on 15 November 1990, there was intense lobbying for provisions that would favour mining and/or utility interests in particular states by introducing exceptions to the baseline allocation of 2.5lb of sulphur dioxide per million British ...”

“... In​ 1959, Morante travelled to the US, where she fell in love with a young painter called Bill Morrow. He was, Tuck writes, ‘the sort of person everyone – men, women, children – fell in love with (in retrospect, this may have been part of his problem)’, and he was predominantly a lover of men. Morante brought him back to Rome and rented a flat ...”

“... year’s Bafta-winning single drama, the Stephen Frears/ Peter Morgan dramatisation of the Blair/ Brown relationship, The Deal). Despite Born’s claim that recent British TV drama had ‘a low tolerance for formal innovation’, many of the innovative devices associated with high-art drama are now staples of mass-market popular serials, from ...”