“... where Larkin lived’, to see: a man in a belted mac returning from work – a respectable man: brown glasses and trilby hat – stop under one of the cavernous chestnuts,    fling his briefcase heavily into the branches, crouch in a hail of conkers, chase them hither and yon in the cobwebby shade,   pocket them, then disappear in the gloaming ...”

“... on the Ministry of Technology. (Ah! The DEA! The Ministry of Technology! The tantrums of George Brown! Later that same day, Crossman dined with ‘Wedgwood Benn’ to discuss the menace of Radio Caroline. There is a decomposing madeleine wedged between every leaf of these diaries, which I have just reread.) In his lenient and chivalrous biography of ...”

“... insight into the politics and the personalities with whom Robin Cook was involved. She met Gordon Brown just after her marriage, but has ‘little remaining impression of Gordon, whom I have met only once or twice since then, and he seems, like many famous people who start their careers almost as child prodigies, to have suffered burn-out of his private ...”

“... that the novelists often availed themselves of single traditional physiognomic correspondences: brown or black eyes are the sign of physical or moral strength; blue eyes belong to gentle characters; ‘strong characters are almost always dark-haired’ while ‘fair hair is often assigned to characters of an essentially gentle nature’ although it is ...”

“... and the Realm. The work made her feel ‘rampantly well’ for once. She would lunch frugally on brown bread and ginger biscuits and sit up working until the small hours. But Edith felt that the journalism took Constance too much away from home, and so Constance obligingly gave it up, just as she had once given up hope of studying piano at a ...”

“... Berlioz’s full conversion took place after hearing a performance of Iphigénie en Tauride. As John Rice argues here, a number of arias in les Danaïdes are written in a simple and affective melodic style reminiscent of parts of Orfeo and La Rencontre imprévue, and several of their contemporaries thought of the two composers in the same breath. Salieri ...”

“... and reached the Colorado River, far to its east. T.S. Eliot’s Mississippi was a ‘strong brown god’: the Colorado River is more like a ruddy writhing serpent. Or was, since the snake has now been chopped into segments by dams, notably by Glen Canyon Dam above the Grand Canyon, and Hoover Dam south of Vegas, each with a gigantic reservoir backed up ...”

“... Congress barely peeped as costs soared – though there were a few notable holdouts, like Senator John McCain, who called it ‘a scandal and a tragedy’. McCain is a leading representative of a dissident American military tradition that prefers light and agile to massive and lumbering, but it may not be insignificant that his home state, Arizona, is one of ...”

“... circles the new guides, with their unmistakably foreign approach, got a mixed reception. John Summerson, reviewing them for the New Statesman, felt a need to bring his readers, and indeed himself, round to the idea. ‘Books on the English counties’ had, as he said, ‘come rather thick since the war’. The others, of varying quality, tended to be ...”

“... Coleman went to Wellesley College and then married Loyd Ring Coleman. She gave birth to a son, John, in 1924, contracted puerperal fever, and was confined for two months as a mental patient in Rochester State Hospital. Recovered, she journeyed with her husband to Paris, where he worked in advertising. For a while Coleman wrote a society column for the ...”

“... her house with a trio of uninvited guests: Mr Vercueil, a white down-and-out, and Bheki and John, two teenagers on the run from the Police. Bheki is the son of Florence, Elizabeth’s black housemaid (Florence also has two baby daughters significantly named Hope and Beauty). But Florence has come to realise that, in a country where children have learnt ...”

“... Selby and McCruiskeen: fantastic, jaunty and terrifying. And yet O’Nolan is not without issue. John Banville’s most recent novel, The Book of Evidence, catches unmistakably the voice and fate of the unnamed narrator of The Third Policeman. Both are murderers, laconic, fastidious, their imaginations stunned. Both find themselves in ‘a queer ...”

“... he would be tormented by ‘desire to copulate with a bronze bottom without copulating with a brown face’. Woolf, heterosexual (though he thought most women ‘extraordinarily ugly’ when naked), had a mild expatriate affair, and probably enjoyed work and play more than he lets on. He does mention specifically the delights of hard riding (‘it is ...”

“... and journalism – into auxiliary volunteer militias. Between them, Harry Evans and Tina Brown raised whole regiments of foot, horse and guns; flooding the bookstores and news-stands with the reassuring visage of the hero of Panama and Vietnam. Not to say an unfeeling thing, but if there were already any symptoms of palsy in the national ...”

“... press, in an early and faint-hearted version of mutinies against discretion still to come, asked John Bullishly why a foreign-born consort should assume precedence over a daughter of King George VI. But this was as nothing to the squalor and piety which marked the Year of Grace 1955. In August, Margaret turned 25 and tried to pick up the threads with ...”