“... repulsion’. In a group called the College of Sociology with collaborators including Leiris and Roger Caillois, Bataille went on to explore various brotherhoods and secret societies which, they thought, tapped into this sacred force. There were accusations that Bataille was more seduced by fascism than critical of it, accusations that resurfaced in the ...”

“... of the East – they were looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the colour of an Eastern crowd. And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh, without a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at night had come to them from the ...”

“... Jesse Florian in Farewell, My Lovely, who ‘had weedy hair of that vague colour which is neither brown nor blonde, that hasn’t enough life in it to be ginger, and isn’t clean enough to be grey’.When Marlowe meets the journalist Anne Riordan, the nearest Chandler comes to creating a female character not entirely defined by her relationship to men, the ...”

“... at all. And today, 15 June, comes George Bush paying a courtesy call on the Queen and Gordon Brown before having a cheering conscience-free get-together with his old mate Tony Blair. And here are the helicopters flying over Regent’s Park to prove it. 26 June, Espiessac. I sit in the wicker rocking-chair in the shade of the willow by the pool. Except ...”

“... Doris was​ in her early forties when I arrived in my vile mustard-coloured coat with a brown velvet collar, my first ‘grown-up’ item of clothing. It was hung in the airing cupboard alongside some marijuana that Doris had grown in the garden her first summer in the house and was now drying out. I never wore the coat again, though we did smoke the dope ...”

“... he said, “I want a new one.” The one he wanted cost £900. We bought it.’Nicholas Paget-Brown​ , who was then the leader of the council, lives alone not far from the Fulham Road. His gentle manners precede him, in the style of a decently prepped, slightly fogeyish man of the 1950s, and he acts as if he might find the modern world fascinating were ...”

“... to try to read it, those who have tried and failed, and … those who write about it’. Roger Marsh, the producer of Jim Norton’s and Marcella Riordan’s haunting audio version, names ‘new readers’, ‘readers who have never been able to make much headway’ and ‘those who already have some familiarity with the book’. For good ...”

“... his ship containing ‘a mass of corpses huddled together … everywhere crimson mingling with the brown, and here and there a waxen-white face with draggled hair staring up into the smiling heavens … Such was our introduction to the glories of war.’ Several men were burned alive. ‘The carnage it caused is awful,’ a Turkish lieutenant wrote after one ...”

“... their correspondence began.Lady Bradshaigh, ‘middle-aged, middle-sized, a degree above plump, brown as an oak wainscot’, was born Dorothy Bellingham into an established Lancashire family in 1704 or 1705. She told Richardson she had been the ‘worst’ of the family’s three girls, ‘very lively, and very faulty’. In 1731, after a dogged ten-year ...”

“... communist. I hadn’t known that this was McChrystal’s idea. He also told his officers to read Roger Trinquier’s Modern Warfare, a French counterinsurgency handbook designed for use in Algeria and famous for its advocacy of torture.McChrystal followed his memoir with three business self-help manuals, published at three-year intervals and copyrighted to ...”

“... Major E. A. Belcher – an eccentric tyrant, later caricatured by Agatha in The Man in the Brown Suit – to join, as financial adviser, a mission to the Dominions which would drum up publicity for the forthcoming Empire Exhibition of 1924. The mission left for South Africa on board the RMS Kildonan Castle in January 1922; Agatha went along for the ...”

“... or salp (commonly known in Southern France as a bijou). But even sea-potatoes do not have large, brown, glossy eyes and an intelligence extending over several million years. If Emma Tennant’s novel exists in a somewhat uneasy relationship to the analytic and theoretical texts which she specifies, William Kotzwinkle’s novelisation remains uncomfortably ...”

“... These books all set out to tell us about ourselves, and to do it by quantification. Their statements are based on economic statistics, demography, official and unofficial measurements, including the measurement of opinion. Some of their conclusions will surprise, for no one reader can expect to have covered the full range of social activity. Their quality must depend on the quality of the ‘facts’ they elicit ...”

“... on Berenson in this book came from Mrs Berenson – above all from a letter in which she warned Roger Fry about the difficulties of resuming good relations with her husband. It begins by sounding like the sort of explanation we have to endure from the owners of vicious dogs or the mothers of beastly children. ‘At the bottom of everything is a curious ...”

“... He thought of calling it ‘Ah, Poor America!’ but it was generally known as ‘The Little Brown Brothers’. (Fante had a sort of anti-talent for titles; Wait Until Spring, Bandini is reminiscent of nothing so much as Woody Allen’s ‘No Kaddish for Weinstein’. He considered giving Dago Red the title of one of the stories in it, ‘The Odyssey of ...”