“... was a desperate State Department – with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and Gordon Brown as the blushing bridesmaid – fearful that if it did not push this through both parties might soon be too old for recycling. The bride was certainly in a hurry, the groom less so. Brokers from both sides engaged in lengthy negotiations on the size of the ...”

“... many of them privatised – are what I see. On the far side of Roman Road are the barracks-style brown brick walkways of the Greenways estate, built in the 1950s, solid and unremarkable, renovated not long ago, providing homes for hundreds; beyond them, its crown poking up beyond the Greenways roof, is Denys Lasdun’s listed Sulkin House, built on the site ...”

“... on the brink of theirs? I didn’t cry when Philip died either. I’d seen him shrivel into a brown husk, the taut dry skin stretched over his skeleton like a mummified body excavated from some desert tomb. I’d seen him in his wheelchair with an oxygen mask clamped to his face, his eyes rotating wildly. I went to the loo and stared at my face and felt ...”

“... he is seated on the lawn as one of an assorted company, including John Strachey, Harold Nicolson, Peter Howard and Professor Joad, of prospective Parliamentary candidates. Three years later, when Mosley was starting to move towards Fascism, there were some letters, which are extant, in which my father sought reassurance from Mosley that his brand of Fascism ...”

“... gym I belong to – became existential torture devices. No more Frasier reruns or baseball: just Peter Jennings and dirty bombs.The boys with tattoos flexed nervously. Even the female-to-male transsexuals looked shaken. (It’s a gay gym.) I went through my own quiet days feeling gusty, shocked and forlorn. Blakey was still in Chicago. One evening I broke ...”

“... box. When I get to the village I find that one of these pensioners was our ex-postman Maurice Brown. I ask him whether the Queen spoke to him. ‘No. She only stopped at people who had something wrong with them. I haven’t, so she just gave me the money.’29 March, Yorkshire. Easter Saturday and an appropriately monastic day out, going first via ...”

“... of Hobsbawm in its own records, which were housed in the Registry, described by the MI5 veteran Peter Wright as ‘a mass of dry paper’ inside which ‘were warm trails waiting to be followed’. This repository, containing an estimated 500,000 files by the mid-1950s, was organised according to an elaborate system of cross-referencing between Personal ...”

“... through the ruins of a captured city. It was in that moment I realised the game was up for Gordon Brown: he doesn’t stroll, he doesn’t do hands-in-pockets. He doesn’t drop in on Hackney Wick, he hits Washington like Livingstone (David) in darkest Africa. Gill’s arrest came when he persisted in recording the hustling convoys of lorries churning up new ...”

“... attention of Facebook’s first external investor, the now notorious Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Again, The Social Network gets it right: Thiel’s $500,000 investment in 2004 was crucial to the success of the company. But there was a particular reason Facebook caught Thiel’s eye, rooted in a byway of intellectual history. In the course of his ...”

“... that Auden had established in Brooklyn with Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his uncle Heinrich, Alma Mahler ...”

“... at the confluence of the rivers Severn and Avon, into an island on the banks of a vast brown waterway resembling the Mississippi Delta. There are clues, though. In the first picture, you can see two jetties that were mangled by the torrent and haven’t been repaired. The wooden boards were sucked off and swallowed by the flood, and only the metal ...”

“... with editorials, articles, broadcasts, appeals explaining to the French that they faced the brown peril and must now rally as one to Chirac, if the Republic was to be saved. Youth demonstrated in the streets, the official left rushed to the side of the president, even much of the far left decided it was the moment of no pasarán, and they too must ...”

“... they are a white, cis, straight bourgeois male – any more than because they are a queer, brown, female metropolitan elite. (Indeed, one way of putting the core insight of psychoanalysis is that none of us is simply any of the categories under which we fall, no matter how much we may consciously identify with it.) But in its basic imperative to read ...”

“... a tailored jacket and jeans, with a blue-edged pocket square in his breast pocket, a scarf and brown brogue boots. He was 47 but looked about 29. There was something studied about him – the Alexander McQueen scarf, the lawyerly punctilio – and I’d never met anyone who spoke so easily about such large sums of money. When I asked him the point of the ...”

“... from Marseille to Oran and come overland in the hope of obtaining a visa to Lisbon. Ugarte (Peter Lorre), a forger and procurer of documents, asks Rick to look after two sets of safe-conduct papers until his clients arrive. ‘You despise me, don’t you?’ he says to Rick. ‘You object to the kind of business I do, huh? But think of all those poor ...”