“... the skin. Red Fog has all the modest desperation of the best American pulps, Jim Thompson, David Goodis. Depression literature. Orphan books written to be abandoned. Dream logic without the luxury of revision. Even the cover illustration is pastiche Gold Medal: it doesn’t illustrate anything in the book, but gloats over a top-heavy blonde. There are ...”

“... Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 ...”

“... some sense intrusive in wishing that they did.The marriage fell apart in the summer of 1962 when David Wevill, a Canadian poet whose work Hughes admired, and his wife, Assia, visited Court Green, the house in Devon where Hughes, Plath and their two young children were living. The Wevills stayed over the weekend of 18 to 20 May, and it was during this visit ...”

“... its ‘racial and cultural homogeneity’ with ‘strict barriers against further immigrations of Brown, Black and Yellow peoples’. The first barrier on the US-Mexico border, Grandin notes, was constructed from wire that had surrounded the camps where Japanese Americans were interned during the Second World War. In the second book, Freedom’s Dominion: A ...”

“... entertaining in their house in Merrion Square. Shaw remembered William Wilde ‘dressed in stuffy brown; and as he had the sort of skin that never even looks clean, he produced a dramatic effect beside Lady Wilde (in full fig) if being, like Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and Evil.’ Harry Furniss wrote ...”

“... writes, ‘changed their windows once a week … and crowds of gawkers gathered to watch the brown paper come down to reveal the next batch of displays.’ Warhol, it was written, ‘is able to create with equal skill and imagination anything from an industrial advertisement to a fashion page to a window display’.He also liked penises. ‘Andy had this ...”

“... It’s a doomed effort, full of condescension and confusion, like a ballet-master analysing James Brown.’Sterling’s basic insight is on target. Alone in Poland, Lem seems to have guessed at what a serious fiction based on technological speculation would look like, and willed himself to equal it. He extrapolated, in other words, from the examples of Wells ...”

“... same-sex love was deleted from the history of ‘Greek homosexuality’ by Kenneth Dover and David Halperin, as if the fact that a spectacularly homosexualising culture produced some of the most spectacular (but non-sodomitical) lesbian love poetry and has a spectacular (but non-sodomitical) homosexual relationship at the centre of its foundational epic ...”

“... of migration between countries within Africa. Jones gives short shrift to scholars such as Wendy Brown, who argued in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010) that today’s border walls are a sign not of strength but that state sovereignty is being eroded by globalisation: they fulfil a psychological role, by providing a reassuring image of security to a ...”

“... from a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate of Auchinleck, mentioned in an additional stanza contained in one version of the poem, was called ‘romantic’ by a son of the house, James Boswell. Kyle counts, then, as a highly romantic vicinity. But it ...”

“... by Naomi Klein’s blurb – ‘inspiring’ – and a frisson added by the book’s appearance: a brown paper wrapping like those used to discourage porn thieves and customs inspectors. Trembling fingers that go further are reminded that this book succeeds Empire (2000), by the same authors, which provided a picture of the global imperium supposed to have ...”

“... the Continent. Le Brun’s image of Karoline was considered risqué because, beneath her reddish-brown gown, her feet are bare. In her engagingly conversational memoir, Souvenirs, Le Brun records that the princess’s husband responded to complaints from his scandalised grandparents by placing a pair of elegant shoes under the frame and explaining they had ...”

“... Left, ‘had the novelist’s gift of telling lies’, and it seems that Roth had it too. Until David Bronsen established the facts in his German-language biography (an English translation is in progress), the record of Roth’s life was an evocative smudge, a rumour worthy of the shadowy border town in which he was born – a town about which, in different ...”

“... allowed him to follow them all through.His friends and scientific colleagues John Herschel and David Brewster pressed Talbot to focus for long enough to publish his findings. ‘I have often wondered,’ Herschel wrote to him in 1833, ‘that being, as I am aware you are, in possession of a number of curious & interesting things in optical science and ...”

“... blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal. Then everything lands on our table in a ...”