“... 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 ...”

“... by the hostility to the euro of the Murdoch press that had helped elect him, soon faded. But Gordon Brown’s firm refusal to abandon sterling, made from his position of strength at the Exchequer, maintained the status quo bequeathed by Major. London would sign up to the Social Chapter that Major had sidestepped, but despite increasingly frantic ...”

“... for Rita I used to spend afternoons at the house of a schoolfriend a year older than myself called Gordon. We’d get on his bed and wrestle, naked from the waist down, sometimes with a pillow between us, sometimes not. And sometimes we’d put a couple of pillows on the bed and each rub up against one. Neither of us ever went on long enough, but the feeling ...”

“... that advocated taking power away from city hall and creating hundreds of green jobs. The mayor, Gordon Paquette, a businessman, responded with a proposal to convert the city’s lakefront into a luxury development boasting three condominium towers, a 150-room hotel, a private boating club and a parking lot. Bernie Sanders, a 39-year-old socialist filmmaker ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... thrown off the project, which was eventually built to a design by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Whatever its programmatic ‘complexity and contradiction’, as Venturi would put it, the Sainsbury Wing ‘looked’ to the casual eye like just another part of Trafalgar Square, all Corinthian columns and Portland stone. ABK never recovered, and neither ...”

“... washing sharing the basement, a desolate and grilling public garden, and the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil. This short passage shows a spontaneous poetic flair rarely equalled in Forster’s fiction, or elsewhere in the diaries: ‘those trudging squares and triangles’, both exact and subjective, the complex social irony of the ‘natives ...”

“... Nothing a Hanmouth woman might wear could compete with Mauro’s trainers (Onitsuka Tigers in brown with this season’s orange trim). They’re a fashion statement in a language straights can’t learn, a sexual signal pitched above heterosexual hearing. Mauro is in town with homely, miserable David, who imagines that his parents will be reassured to see ...”