“... escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and ...”

“... like many others, he was tempted to hide his ‘timid heart’ by ‘ruffling’ in a blue or brown shirt. Certainly, he espoused hatred at the very moment he was claiming to be protected from it by Fascism. ‘The Seven Sages’ (1931) gives voice to an imaginary group of old men who gripe about the world and imply the poet’s descent from ...”

“... 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 ...”