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“... on the book. Much of his work is now available in English, smoothly and wittily translated by Andrew Bromfield. Pelevin has a relentlessly black sense of humour, and a satirical touch and use of the fantastic reminiscent of Bulgakov. His mastery of street language goes with a gift for extravagant simile: the sky is ‘like an old, worn mattress drooping ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... out of the most hideous of crimes) to the pleasure she was said to have taken in murdering Martin Brown and Brian Howe? Again: how could anyone know? Given the profit that these papers were making out of their horror at her profit (an obvious point), not to say out of the horror they drew their readers into – given, that is, their own traffic in the ...”

“... their feet, 1938. Girls in gowns, with soft shoes and a silver trophy, 1960. Boys with cigarettes, brown uniforms, along the wall outside, 1945. And orange-coloured polaroids of dancers and winners in all the years since. Colin Osman and the others close the meeting for another month. Most of them won’t be staying for the band and bingo. Their business is ...”

“... stood high in our repertoire of time-fillers. ‘Where’s Broon?’ – the boy’s name was Alan Brown – took its place in a list of nasty games that included snipes (skinning each other’s knuckles with cards after each lost game), kiss-cuddle-and-torture (with girls), Blue-Murder (the same, but sorer) and that kind of thing. If anyone came to the door ...”

“... swine, rhododendrons, Caulerpa) and some accidentally as fellow passengers (rats, brown tree snakes which have destroyed the bird life of the island of Guam, Dutch elm disease, the pathogens which went to South America with the conquistadors). The more successful invaders are often hidden from the unspecialised eye, particularly when they’re ...”

“... provide. There was no Robert Frost or Allen Ginsberg in space, but we have Buzz: ‘Our blue and brown habitat of humanity appeared like a jewel of life in the midst of the surrounding blackness. From space there were no observable borders between nations, no observable reasons for the wars we were leaving behind.’ Leaving behind? Come, come Buzz. He was ...”

“... me, I never knew that the lower classes had such white skins’; ‘Gentlemen never wear brown in London.’ (‘It is necessary to admit,’ Harold Nicolson wrote in his own fawning Curzon biography, ‘that it required several months of close association with Lord Curzon before even the most well-intentioned observer could wholly rid himself of a ...”

“... is 15 years since she died, and memories of her are not as sharp as they were. Which makes Craig Brown’s enterprise not only a marvellous freak of literature but a matchless summoner of our yesterdays. It is a collage, montage or bricolage of glittery bits culled from two hundred biographies, authorised and unauthorised, written by cashiered gossip ...”

“... to play Scripps the religious boy, and doesn’t even bother to mention that he plays the piano; Andrew Knott from Wakefield, who comes in like the wind has blown the door open and knows the scene off by heart, as do several of the others. This is new, as actors would normally expect to read the scene and if they are bad readers, as many actors are, this ...”

“... was elected, he spoke at a mental health trust fun day in his constituency instead of going on the Andrew Marr Show. Later that day he was filmed as he hurried along the pavement outside Westminster in silence, refusing to answer reporters’ questions: it ‘looked like a perp walk’, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian. ‘He isn’t playing the ...”

“... which had terrorised Northern settlers and sacked the town of Lawrence, but ridiculed Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina in unusually personal terms, alluding to his speech impediment. ‘He shows an incapacity of accuracy,’ Sumner declared. ‘He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.’ Brooks was Butler’s second cousin ...”

“... Davies is appointed chairman-designate of ‘SuperSIB’ (or, as it is later christened by Gordon Brown, the Financial Services Authority), as much to his surprise as everyone else’s. He had been on his way to South America in his capacity as deputy governor of the Bank of England, having just been involved in that same capacity in seeking a successor to ...”

“... assumed. In Caravaggio’s early paintings clearly-defined areas of flesh colour, buff and sandy brown are contrasted with neat patterns of black and white and golden-brown clothing, and with the red of wine or cherries and the fresh green of vine leaves – all contained originally (as early inventories invariably ...”

“... easy it would be to leave if I wanted to. But I was fine there. All I wanted was to stare at the brown carpet for a minute or two. ‘You can smoke out there if you want to. It doesn’t bother me,’ she shouted from the bedroom. ‘It’s OK, Mrs McFarlane,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘I don’t smoke cigarettes.’ ‘I don’t know why not,’ she ...”