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“... a pair of scientists at the California Institute of Technology, Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown, announced that they had discovered compelling evidence of an as-yet-unseen giant planet – Planet X – orbiting the Sun, seven times further out than Neptune.1 This isn’t the first time that astronomers have believed there may be nine planets in the ...”

“... valleys that make its arteries. The sequoias rise so tall, on their 200-foot trunks like furred brown tendons, that as you stand beneath them and look upward to their crowning needle-clusters, you feel yourself sucked through a time-tunnel into some primal and unpeopled continent. Muir rejoiced to think that they were in their prime and ‘swaying in the ...”

“... A huge crowd has gathered. Alexander Bloch from PEN, an elegant figure in a pin-striped suit and brown suede shoes, nods towards the speakers and says: ‘The strong, silent Russian hasn’t been invented yet.’ Madame Bloch asks me if I do not think the translation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera rather ‘unfortunate’. Our programme says we are to see it ...”

“... of the empty cosmos, of the unfeelingness of causal connections, I concluded that this message of brown and purple blotches on a background of browny-white had been intended just for me.’ In both of O’Hanlon’s chronicles of his chaotic river jaunts, the first down the Rajang river in Borneo, this between the Orinoco and the Amazon, bird-watching ...”

“... sees England as a crowded and shabbily decent third-world country, and she shares with Reid and Craig Raine a splendidly Mediterranean sense of joy. Where Larkin and Motion are the troubled elegists of a vanished world power, these writers inhabit the liberated atmosphere of light-filled studios. They are flâneurs in an English market that resembles ‘the ...”

“... and summer. I can rhyme them off: Noss and Hermaness, Sula Sgeir, Stac Li and Stac an Armin, Ailsa Craig. These ones are ancient. There are also newish ones on the Aberdeenshire mainland at Troup Head, and on Westray in Orkney. There’s only one colony in England, at Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire. Silent and elegant at sea, gannets make a racket in their ...”

“... yet ‘womanlike’ (Calvin Klein); ‘exquisite “bête”’ yet ‘monstrous “belle”’ (Craig McDean); ‘powerful’ yet ‘vulnerable’ (Laura Collins); ‘unobtainable’ yet ‘accessible’ (Collins again). Or to quote the photographer David Bailey: ‘She’s the kind of girl you wished lived next door, but she’s never going to.’ Many ...”

“... to nail a particular moment to the page with a novelist’s shrewd eye for contingent detail. When Craig Raine introduced his selection of Kipling’s prose earlier this year, he singled out for particular praise a sentence from the first paragraph of ‘Love-o’-Women’: ‘There remained only on the barrack-square the blood of man calling from the ...”

“... governor of Virginia; on 19 January, a Republican who describes himself as independent, Scott Brown, won Ted Kennedy’s senate seat in Massachusetts. The scale of these victories made them particularly ominous. McDonnell took 59 per cent of the votes and Brown 52 per cent, in states where Obama a year earlier had ...”

“... proof of the Union’s benefit to Scotland – its chief architects, Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown, both of them Scottish, were also the most prominent leaders of the campaign against independence six years later. The role of Paterson’s Bank of England – and the currency it controls – is today the greatest single weakness in the case for ...”

“... I read under Hazel: ‘Fruit, a true nut, egg-shaped, up to 2cm long, pale green becoming brown with woody shell, enclosed in deeply and irregularly lobed involucre, nuts solitary or in clusters.’ I like the Joycean pedantry of that word for husk, ‘involucre’. Hazel is the tree of knowledge, ‘noble of the wood’, its Irish vernacular name is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he moved badly; he was no athlete, hated having to get up on a horse, and had, according to Ivor Brown, ‘the most meaningless legs imaginable’. He had to conquer, and succeeded completely in doing so, his early tendency to shyness, self-consciousness and laziness. He was proud of his voice, perhaps occasionally too much in love with it, especially in ...”

“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”

“... experience fighting against the kinds of common experience labelled ‘heritage’. There are brown signs directing you off the road to crucial destinations, but in Cumberland, for instance, the land itself is the naked truth, the thing that the heritage industry can’t quite bottle and label. There’s just this immensity, with the clouds scudding over ...”