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“... Nicholson to Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast. Both artists were married: Hepworth to the sculptor Jack Skeaping, whom she had met while on a scholarship in Rome, and Nicholson to the painter Winifred, who stayed behind at their farmhouse in Cumbria to look after their two small children and new baby. At Happisburgh, where the other invited guests included ...”

“... is 15 years since she died, and memories of her are not as sharp as they were. Which makes Craig Brown’s enterprise not only a marvellous freak of literature but a matchless summoner of our yesterdays. It is a collage, montage or bricolage of glittery bits culled from two hundred biographies, authorised and unauthorised, written by cashiered gossip ...”

“... In his first Father Brown story, ‘The Blue Cross’, published in 1910, G.K. Chesterton introduced a ‘colossus of crime’ who seemed to have strayed in from Comic Cuts: a giant Gascon called Flambeau who planted dummy pillar boxes in quiet suburbs in the hope of catching the odd postal order, and who ran a fraudulent dairy company without benefit of cows, his agents merely moving the milk containers outside other people’s doors to the doors of his own customers ...”

“... Davies is appointed chairman-designate of ‘SuperSIB’ (or, as it is later christened by Gordon Brown, the Financial Services Authority), as much to his surprise as everyone else’s. He had been on his way to South America in his capacity as deputy governor of the Bank of England, having just been involved in that same capacity in seeking a successor to ...”

“... And ‘Nobody’s perfect’ means . . . Well, let’s go back a little. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, two musicians on the run, are impersonating women so that they can hold down jobs in an all-female band. Lemmon in his role as the eyelash-fluttering Daphne manages to captivate the rich Osgood Fielding, played by Joe E. ...”

“... are arrested in their smoothing.’ As for the other two riders, one of them purports to be ‘Mr Brown’, the uncle of Mr Bartholomew, and the man in the dragoon’s hat calls himself ‘Sergeant Farthing’, Mr Brown’s manservant, a sort of ‘minder’ against highwaymen. John Fowles interposes, in his ...”

“... through Facebook accounts, until a second message told me he had swapped his father’s surname, Brown, for his mother’s, Lindsay. I typed in ‘William Lindsay’ and there he was: a boy in a EA7 bomber jacket with headphones round his neck, flaming hair and a lopsided smile.When I got back to Glasgow, I learned why my contact had risked his job to give ...”

“... the avant-garde. As a heavyweight boxer, his career peaked in 1916, when he fought the formidable Jack Johnson in Barcelona. He lasted six rounds. These two strands of Cravan’s career are not as diverse as one might think: his stance as a writer was extremely combative – confrontation and ‘anti-art’ polemic were his métier. As the poet Mina Loy, who ...”

“... a birthday cake. The man nods; his face, which is yellow and narrow, makes a narrow smile. Small brown hair, like feathers, springs from his brow. Like my mother, he smiles without showing his teeth. He smiles in a minimal way, as a social obligation: turning up the corners of his mouth. He nods; he acknowledges me. We are home at Bankbottom, in my ...”

“... this small sable completed a generally lugubrious expression which started with his melancholy brown eyes ... That’s a fair example of the capsule physical description with which Kerr introduces each new character. It’s elaborately constructed to stamp itself on the reader’s vision, and is completely ignored. You form your own picture from little ...”

“... larger unit of the fledgling ANA. Sitting around a wooden table, Mac, Shadders, Dave Wilkinson and Jack Mizon described how much of an ask that is. They started politely and diplomatically by describing the ANA as ‘below average’ but were encouraged by the general laughter to give me the whole story. By the time they had finished I had an image of the ANA ...”

“... leader, and that he had been decisively out-manoeuvred by his long-term political rival Gordon Brown.* Strongly influenced by the media furore surrounding Cook’s first years in office, including the arms to Sierra Leone affair, diplomatic gaffes in India and Israel, and the embarrassingly public break-up of his marriage, Kampfner’s study is unduly ...”

“... Here lives, besides Annie Connor, her daughter Maggie, who is my godmother and a widow, who has a brown raincoat and a checked woollen scarf. She does errands for people and is at their beck and call. Here lives Beryl, Maggie’s daughter, my heroine: a schoolgirl, dimpled and saucy. There is only one doll for which I ever care, and that one, in tribute to ...”

“... in by this nonsense and then parroted it back to us. The numbers question was investigated by Jack Brown, an American writer who has lived in Cairo for several years and who on 11 July published a detailed article in Maghreb émergent, an indispensable source of serious coverage of North African developments, republished in English on the website ...”

“... as Sally Mann). He assembled poems about married love, alongside his partner (and colleague at Brown) the poet C.D. Wright. He delved further into geology, especially in the aptly titled Science & Steepleflower (1998). In 2008 he published As a Friend (2008), a novel or a roman à clef, linked to Wright’s early life. He also fashioned an astonishing ...”