“... He is referring to passionate friendships with men – with the novelist Reynolds Price and with Bryan Obst, a zoologist who died of Aids in 1991, and was buried to the sound of birdsong. Stephen’s putative conversion to heterosexuality is treated here as a happy, if also unhappy myth. His accounts of intermittent meetings with Obst are well judged and ...”

“... Oak Tavern on Lombard Street in 1663, where he encountered ‘a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with’ – that would be Château Haut-Brion, still one of the most sought-after Bordeaux. James showed through investigation into the Exchequer and Chancery records the real extent of the ...”

“... of the whole Greek corpus now come in a bumper volume, Collected Ancient Greek Novels, edited by Bryan Reardon.) This is teen-romance in its salad days. Fate separates young lovers; they travel through hostile climes, endure trials of life and virtue, come together and live happily ever after. The bad end badly, and the virgin end virgin (except that ...”

“... American South between 1877 and 1950. For almost two decades the EJI and its executive director, Bryan Stevenson, have been fighting against the racial inequities of the American criminal justice system, and their legal trench warfare has met with considerable success in the Supreme Court. This legal work continues. But in 2012 the organisation decided to ...”

“... a kind of intellectual tourism saved from superficiality by its clear-eyed impressionistic grasp. Bryan Green’s Knowing the Poor pursues another, more systematic set of claims about the relation between text, theory and reality. Again it draws on a wide range of current ‘discourses’ – Althusserian Marxism, Foucault, post-structuralism, Frankfurt ...”

“... or mourned – their children, all the time. Like the best of those poets, such as Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, Kasischke keeps referring to the practicalities that parents (usually mothers) have to consider, while children (or fathers) can imagine beautiful things: ‘somehow I became/a high brick wall fully expecting/the little blue flowers to thrive in my ...”

“... school were correct: the motives for sending armed forces to the Continent were mainly political. Bryan Ranft explains how the Royal Navy stumbled into the First World War with the almost fatal doctrine that the system of convoy was out of date and could no longer be employed for the protection of merchant shipping. The Admiralty also comes out badly from ...”

“... relations with a series of Englishmen – the brotherly Ellis, the kind, plain doctor, Bryan Donkin, the distant and formidable mathematician, Karl Pearson (with whom she participated in the high-toned Men and Women’s Club for re-defining the nature of the sexes) – show her drawn to men who were trying to transcend sexual convention. In ...”

“... doubt – actually seek to prevent it? Can one really imagine him siding with Eric Heffer against Bryan Gould, or Ron Todd against Gavin Laird? However little he liked to contemplate the rapacious pursuit of private profit by industrialists pretending that money spent on the social services ought instead to be left in their own pockets, Tawney had equally ...”

“... the product of history, and to a considerable extent of Islamic law itself. The sociologist Bryan Turner refers to a ‘cluster of absences’ in Islamic history: no concept of liberty, no autonomous corporate institutions and assemblies, no ‘city’, no self-confident middle class. Many of the institutions through which popular power is channelled in ...”

“... revival. The two teams were – and so they were – ‘in different leagues’. Before Bryan Robson’s arrival as manager and his signing, not long afterwards, of Juninho, Emerson and Ravanelli, Middlesbrough star-names had been names from the distant past: Wilf Mannion, George Hard-wick, Brian Clough. For a brief period in the ...”

“... defining tragedy. Yvonne abandoned the Commander to live with a much younger man called Timothy Bryan, a one-time priest who had become a devotee of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. When Hitchens was 24, living in London and, as he puts it, ‘cutting [his] first little swath through town’, he received a phone call telling him that Yvonne had been found dead in ...”

“... the voice has moved even closer to the condition of prose, as in the elegy he wrote for his friend Bryan Winter:This is only a noteTo say how sorry I amYou died. You will realiseWhat a position it putsMe in.(‘Dear Bryan Winter’)No one could mistake that for Eliot, but an interest in the possible proximity between poetry ...”

“... guilt-ridden: Mrs Mothersole in ‘The Ash Tree’, Ann Clark in ‘Martin’s Close’, Theodosia Bryan in ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ and the terrible figure in ‘a shapeless sort of blackened sun-bonnet’ in ‘Wailing Well’. We don’t need to have read any of the Freud which James would have run several miles from to interpret what Mr Dunning in ...”

“... and the subsequent policy review conducted by the Shadow Secretary for Trade and Industry, Bryan Gould. Who are the two young members of the Tribune Group passionately arguing against the inclusion in Labour’s new programme of a modest measure, supported by the Tribune Group, to buy 2 per cent of the shares in British Telecom and thus restore public ...”