“... which is a sign of how vivid the early traumas remain. She likes both Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush, and resents Downing Street’s failure to make better use of her as an ‘asset’, but doesn’t notice that the two presidential wives have a clarity to their respective roles that she never seeks in her own. She eventually sees through Carole ...”

“... had organised and was chairing the event, had managed to pull in South Thanet’s sitting Tory MP, Laura Sandys, a believer in EU membership who is standing down at the next election, and the candidates from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. I watched Farage while the others were taking their turns to speak. Photographs and news footage always show ...”

“... leaves us hardly more curious of her process, or of the experience in her that fed it, than the brown thrush who tells his story from the garden bough.’ He alluded sarcastically to ‘the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of magazines, who have found their “dear”, our dear, everybody’s dear, Jane so ...”

“... each night, Back in Nagasaki where the fellows chew tobaccy, And the women wicky-wacky woo! And Laura Nyro. ‘I know her. I forget her name. She’s dead, right?’ ‘You don’t know shit,’ the Maestro snarled. He was rendering me a service that, nowadays, in the absence of my mother and father, a number of my close friends feel obliged to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the title Channon had longed for.)For Channon, the House of Commons was a ‘club’, a ‘brown, smelly, tawny, male paradise’, and although he and Nicolson were never significant political players, both were keen observers. Nicolson became a devotee of Churchill’s, refusing to join in the chorus of praise when Chamberlain announced that he was ...”

“... he said, “I want a new one.” The one he wanted cost £900. We bought it.’Nicholas Paget-Brown​ , who was then the leader of the council, lives alone not far from the Fulham Road. His gentle manners precede him, in the style of a decently prepped, slightly fogeyish man of the 1950s, and he acts as if he might find the modern world fascinating were ...”

“... something we’ve seen before. Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska, in 1936, to Ted and Mary Brown. Her father was a mining engineer, and her mother, as would be repeated over and over in the stories, was a Moynihan. The family name is significant. We are offered a picture of Lucia sucking worriedly at a bottle, not yet understanding that some days are ...”

“... with plastic bowls of fruit at £1 a throw. The single gold coin is the dominant unit of exchange; brown tokens are trodden into tarmac like cigarette stubs or used gum. The blue wall carries a CORONET sign as a reminder of the building’s history. The ABC Cinema (as it was originally called) opened in 1932 as a 2000-seat Art Deco conversion of the former ...”

“... glimpse of himself in a run-down theatre in New Jersey, listening to a black singer called Janice Brown perform numbers from the musical Evita, or driving the local roads listening to Sinéad O’Connor on the radio – she, too, is Evita, asking some place called Aryentina not to cry for her. But then in the next chapter, probably the strongest and darkest ...”

“... was Nazi Germany. Not long ago, the American Historical Review published an article by Kate Brown – which Pipes surely disliked, if he read it – with the arresting subtitle ‘Why Kazakhstan and Montana are Nearly the Same Place’. In the old days, it was Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that were ‘nearly the same place’, and the underpinning ...”

“... EXTRACTS’ accounted for ‘nine-tenths of the reading of the reading public’. When, in 1928, Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s Pamphlet against Anthologies charged the genre with reducing poetry to a ‘packet-commodity’, the only alternative that they proposed revealed just how inescapable the anthology had become. The ‘full Corpus’ that could ...”

“... tries to weaken this with the spelling ‘Mama’). ‘Mamma’ transforms Combray into a Laura-Ashleyfied English nursery and the dilemmas of the neurasthenically Oedipal boy into the problems of a little Lord Fauntleroy, best dealt with by a vigorous spanking at a suitably brutal public school (to take an alternative example, could one imagine that ...”

“... of the popular historical imagination in late 20th-century Britain told via case studies, from Laura Ashley fabrics to the touristification of Ironbridge. Since his death from cancer in 1996, however, Samuel has been prolific. A second volume of Theatres of Memory, titled Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, came out in 1998, followed in 2006 by The Lost ...”

“... simply stamped out; with the Pre-Raphaelites, there was indeed such a potential – he cited Madox Brown’s house, where ‘there were not only artists but also atheists, political refugees, vagrants: there was the kind of widening which was questioning the order of a much wider area’ – and this did link to Morris’s development. But Williams could not ...”