“... a braided rug, a tear in the screen door, a bust of Brahms, the water oiling itself between brown riverbanks. Under the tutelage of Mary Tucker, perhaps the first woman she ever loved romantically, she practised the piano for hours a day, repeating the same tricky passages until she was a general menace to the neighbourhood. After a bout of rheumatic ...”

“... of fractured looking on the internet; either way, it is full of diverting detail. In 1707, Thomas Brown wrote that some of the singing men at St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey ‘dayly come wreeking hot out of a Bawdy-House into the Church; and others Stagger out of a Tavern to Afternoon-Prayers, and Hickup over a little of the Littany, and so back ...”

“... off without anaesthetic. A few days later, he suffered another blow: the death of his infant son, Richard. Although the wound healed well, the recovery would have been gruelling. All the while, the invoices and orders kept piling up. At the time of his surgery, Wedgwood styled himself ‘Potter to Her Majesty’ Queen Charlotte and was on the way to becoming ...”

“... would have been pleased by the comparison, citing Steinbeck, along with Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright, Nelson Algren and Sherwood Anderson, as influences. All of them deployed melodrama to drive home the failure of America to live up to its ideals; all of them wrote to expose inequality and economic Darwinism. The Magic Kingdom is Banks’s ...”

“... your come-uppance without being wholly evil. In Shame, which stars the country’s heart-throb, Richard Mofe-Damijo, and ‘the ageless’ (and Hollywood-bound) Liz Benson, it is enough to falter. Daniel and Rena are a happily married couple with three children whose life changes when Daniel loses his job. He is wrongly accused of theft and tortured by the ...”

“... The interiors are bedrooms and bars, basements and dank living rooms, wallpapered or splattered brown or plastered with notes and images. As the sequence progresses, associations form, with visual jokes and provocative contrasts. Mouths keep mashing against ears, chins, other mouths; arms wrap themselves around necks and waists; hands hold other hands. Her ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long and ...”

“... and leading news correspondents Crane met in Cuba such as Charles Michelson, Ernest McCready and Richard Harding Davis. These are rich materials but at the same time they are incomplete and sparse. Crane was not a prolific letter-writer and he left no diaries or memoir. Further confusing matters was Crane’s first biographer, Thomas Beer, whose Stephen ...”

“... analogous to the ‘Brunonian’ theory of medicine, invented by the Scottish physician John Brown, who had taught that health was an equilibrium between the ‘excitability’ of the nervous system, and the external stimuli by which it was activated. Every disease was the result either of insufficient stimulation, and therefore of wasted ...”

“... it can’t. Hence the current perplexity. History might reasonably credit Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin as the first to notice that something may be seriously wrong in this part of the wood. Their 1979 paper, ‘The Spandrels of S. Marco and The Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, ignited an argument about the ...”

“... it was the Democratic coterie that had elevated him which rallied round. The campaign was led by Richard Holbrooke, imposing the changes in Annan’s entourage that were deemed necessary to save him. In fact, what is really striking about Annan’s tenure as secretary-general is less his personal characteristics than the nature of the inner circle that ...”

“... Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan) is little more than a propaganda outfit. The NHS? Crippled by Blair and Brown with their PFIs and privatisations and now well on its own way to privatisation thanks to the last Health Bill. The railway companies? Loathed by the bulk of their ‘customers’ they still receive state subsidies although the idea of renationalising them ...”

“... A train rushes across a bridge and is bearing down on a hare that’s running over the washed-brown bed of a railway track. The hare isn’t immediately obvious because it is partially obscured by the driving rain. The train will catch up with the hare and kill it: there’s no escape, the track is encased by walls. The hare’s typical act of ...”

“... 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 ...”