“... or salp (commonly known in Southern France as a bijou). But even sea-potatoes do not have large, brown, glossy eyes and an intelligence extending over several million years. If Emma Tennant’s novel exists in a somewhat uneasy relationship to the analytic and theoretical texts which she specifies, William Kotzwinkle’s novelisation remains uncomfortably ...”

“... part. Here is a 1957 letter about their relationship from O’Hara to Ashbery, which appears in David Lehman’s useful The Last Avant Garde (1998): I don’t see any use in either of us going through the strain of pretending we like each other as much as we once did. I don’t know why, for instance, he has singled me out for the accusation that I’ve ...”

“... been Taken multiple times and will not be Taken again. Someone, anyone, must go in his stead. His brown burning face thrusts through Scully’s window, and he tapes her mouth and puts her in the trunk of his car, where her pale irises shine like fish scales. Then Duane Barry drives south through green needles. He does not look dirty but like earth ...”

“... Williams’s five boys. In April 1994 Maxine had left the family home she shared with her husband David Handley in Newark Knok, and taken the kids to live at the house of her boyfriend Alex Joseph, at Lobelia Close in Beckton. Daniel went to Beckton Cross primary school, and was one of those kids who’d talk to anyone. He already had girlfriends, and was one ...”

“... not necessarily involving intimacy, was essential. In perhaps the most interesting contribution, David Wootton uses Bacon’s essays to suggest both that friendship is a key to our understanding, the favourite being ‘a special sort of friend’, and one that we are slow to turn in the lock, given ‘the insignificance of friendship in our own ...”

“... enemy – hence the scandalous attempt by a committee of right-wing Labour MPs headed by George Brown to get MI5 to spy on their left-wing opponents within the Party in 1961, and Wilson’s use of MI5 against the seamen’s strike in 1966. Meanwhile the successive defections of Maclean, Burgess and Philby not only created an atmosphere of hysterical ...”

“... the fatal tendency of the Conservative governments to which Britain has been subjected since 2010. David Cameron’s declaration in January 2013 that, if the Conservatives won the next election, they would offer a referendum on membership of the EU – which wasn’t a significant concern, never mind a priority, for British voters – is a fine ...”

“... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...”

“... study of the Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost, and Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated. David Van Reybrouck’s enormous history is the latest addition to this literature. Van Reybrouck is a Dutch-speaking Belgian journalist whose father was working as an electrical engineer in Katanga at the time of Moïse Tshombe’s secessionist uprising in ...”

“... or pools, each named after an Ovidian legend of loss of love; the second is a brown pool in a torrential stream between steep English hillsides. The sequence, recording ‘Epiphanies all around us Always perhaps’, in a sense finds no answer to its opening question: ‘And what’s to be made of that?’ Any sense of answer or ...”

“... development conjured from the Bryant & May match factory, the weaver’s garret occupied by David Rodinsky above a decommissioned synagogue in Princelet Street, and the first speculative (and doomed) ‘Montmartre meets Montserrat’ restaurant on Dalston Lane. Wright managed to get an entire book out of a few hundred yards of old degraded Hackney ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... these alienated lines: A scene that makes the cold achill Large grounds bethronged with thistles brown Shivering & madding up & down Was but a bramble in the place Twould be a sort of living grace A shape of shelter in the wind For stock to chew their cuds behind But all is level cold & dull & osier swamps with water full The blasted bareness, the ‘cold ...”

“... was said to be very popular, along with ‘Mean Tweets 2024’.‘It’s got this beautiful soft brown cover on it,’ a woman said of the Trump-endorsed Bible she got for $75 plus tax. ‘I love it,’ she added. ‘It shows how much our future president is leaning into his faith.’I spotted a man who was selling The Collected Poems of Donald ...”

“... has taken the opportunity to talk openly about the worrying thoughts in our heads as we drain the brown fluid from the meat in a polystyrene punnet. Obesity, heart disease, animal welfare, greenhouse gases, the nagging intimation that we can’t go on as we have without parts of the food chain shearing away: Defra grasps that our misgivings, like our ...”