“... in London. The Hadfields arrived in the autumn of 1779, only months before the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots broke out in the capital. The family was not directly affected. They were as usual in possession of excellent connections with ‘the first people of fashion’, including Reynolds and Kauffman, and they settled in Hanover Square. It was an uneasy ...”

“... emphasises that Gladdie is no ignoramus. She is devoted to the poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon and startles her in-laws by quoting from ‘The Sick Stockrider’, the most resonant of all bushranger ballads:’Twas merry ’mid the black-woods, when we spied the station roofs,To wheel the wild scrub-cattle at the yard,With a running fire of ...”

“... Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, told the story of Anglo-Pakistani Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke) who, tired of being patronised and bullied by his family, decides to get ahead by opening a gleaming new laundrette in South London. Having acquired the necessary start-up cash by conning a family friend in a drug deal, he employs as his partner ...”

“... he had concocted – potted shrimps rolled up in smoked salmon with small triangles of thinly cut brown bread – was motivated by hunger. Sometimes, when I was engaged in this illicit reading, my whole body shaking, I would try to envisage what my father would say were he to discover me in flagrante delicto. His first reaction would, I knew, be mockery, but ...”

“... group, now at the top of the New York avant-garde art world,’ Melvyn Bragg explains, blunt brown sideburns toning nicely with his blunt brown tie. A bit later he addresses Acker directly. ‘You talk in your books about doing away with meaning. What do you mean by that, more precisely?’ She smiles.For this ...”

“... of reproach and supermarkets are running out of Argentinian beef. The Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, is accused of doing too much and doing too little. The questions surrounding the foot and mouth epidemic – where will it all end? how did it all start? – might be understood to accord with anxiety about every aspect of British agriculture today. The ...”

“... By the time I met the leopard the gold had faded to beige and the black spots to donkey-brown. Once I took the photos into primary school, thinking to impress the girls with the exoticism of my family history. It didn’t go as I’d hoped. It wasn’t that they mocked the notion of an undersized ten-year-old in grey flannel shorts and National ...”

“... espresso, watched Satyajit Ray films, and listened to recordings by Carlos Montoya and Dexter Gordon. She befriended closeted gays and other misfits, sharing their highbrow pretensions and their sense of marginality. Soon after she graduated, her father smelled another business opportunity and moved the family to Honolulu, where she dropped the name ...”

“... David Mellor (greatly exaggerated, but not his only alleged misdemeanour), Hartley Booth, Michael Brown (though he is a borderline case, since he resigned from office while denying allegations that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget David Trevinnick and Graham Riddick, suspended from their jobs as Parliamentary Private ...”

“... to feel for the New Labour ‘Project’ in the 1990s. For a while, it had seemed as if Blair and Brown were contemplating a Charter 88-style programme of constitutional reform, incorporating PR and an alliance with the Liberal Democrats, as well as radical measures of Lords reform and devolved government. As it has turned out, however, Blairism is ‘Hormone ...”

“... death. It won an Academy Award. Debbie Reynolds was in a 1964 film version of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, based loosely on the life of one of the most famous of the first-class survivors, which was nominated for six Oscars. With the discovery of the wreck in 1985, some twenty kilometres from where the Titanic had reported its position, the ship’s afterlife ...”

“... him to Jean Lucinda Johnson, a precocious 16-year-old whose ‘skin was the warm reddish brown of a perfectly roasted turkey breast the moment it comes from the oven’. She would become his first wife. Himes quit college at 17, and began to pack a .44 calibre Colt. ‘It was much later in life that I came to understand I simply hadn’t accepted my ...”

“... prewar, internationally admired LT was notable for being allowed by the government to do what Gordon Brown’s Treasury forbids Transport for London to do in the 21st century: issue bonds and solicit credit underwritten by the government, which means that loans can be obtained more cheaply. Wolmar runs briskly through the history of the Underground ...”

“... In her rollicking Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds (2010), Lyndall Gordon suggests that Emily would not have taken well to being excluded from areas of her own house for hours at a time while her brother and his mistress did God knows what behind closed doors. Lavinia, on the other hand, quickly became an accomplice, often ...”

“... of years after he became leader, the Conservatives received a series of damaging leaks about Gordon Brown’s government which could only have come from a civil servant. In November 2008, police raided the parliamentary office of Damian Green, a Tory MP and a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, in connection with the leaks, and arrested him ...”