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“... the staff lunch that allowed him to behave as ‘an encyclopedic egoist’, in his colleague Ivor Brown’s phrase, who drank large brandies and smoked big cigars and entertained a loyal audience that included the proprietor, the courtly Waldorf, and writers such as C.A. Lejeune, hired as film critic from the Manchester Guardian, and Joyce Grenfell, who as ...”

“... men, rebels without causes; we believe in the dynamism of the times ... Our culture heroes are not Colin Wilson and John Osborne, rather Floyd Patterson and Col. Pete Everest are more likely candidates for the title. Painful stuff, one imagines, for a man who knew what it was to be fashionable. Keith Vaughan had plenty of self-loathing, but more ...”

“... between owner and finder. It is a nice question how this stipulation would apply to my passport. Colin Thubron’s wonderful book In Siberia (1999) describes the author’s visit to a village on the river Yenisei in the far north inhabited largely by one of the native peoples of Siberia, the Entsy. It is a remote, brutal place where the only consolation is ...”

“... violence against black people, but the protests against the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray were mostly confined to the cities in which the deaths had occurred. Obama was seen as sympathetic to BLM’s concerns, even if he offered little more than memorable speeches. Floyd’s death not only follows the killings of Breonna ...”

“... In January 1999, Colin Middleton hanged himself in prison. He’d been in custody since 1982, when he was convicted – aged 14 – of murdering his 18-month-old niece. While in prison, he had harmed himself seriously, written to the governor about his mental illness, and spoken about suicide to other inmates. On the day before his death he didn’t leave his cell, even for meals, and placed a rug over the inspection port ...”

“... know nothing about), we sold out to a property millionaire and I accepted an offer to join Curtis Brown, the agents. Small publishing is a risky undertaking at best. I remember John Lehmann’s warning: ‘You sit there listening to the rats under the floorboards.’ As a sailor, I would prefer to say that storm cones were for ever up. But we had our ...”

“... event, perhaps the sixth mass extinction, but that recognition has been slow in coming. In 1963, Colin Bertram, a marine biologist and polar explorer, warned that human expansion could destroy ‘most of the remaining larger mammals of the world, very many of the birds, the larger reptiles, and so many more both great and small’, and in 1979 the biologist ...”

“... known to be having an affair. Luxor, 14 January. Tea on the terrace of the Winter Palace Hotel, a brown stucco building no different from the Winter Gardens of many an English seaside town because built around the same time and nowadays as rundown and deserted as they are. We watch the sun set over the Nile, a scene captured by dozens of tourists with film ...”

“... in those pre-xerox days sharing with some fellow students the typing of The Blue Book and The Brown Book in multiple carbons, from a set available in Ithaca – pre-Investigations texts dating from the mid-Thirties which circulated in samizdat until they were finally published in 1960 as part of the still continuing stream of volumes from the Nachlass.1 ...”

“... police were fumbling with handcuffs. It was this spectacle – more than the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, after a violent altercation – that set off the demonstrations which continue in many American cities to protest against the mistreatment and killing of citizens with impunity. The Senate Select Committee report on CIA detention and ...”

“... though Pevsner said nothing about Furry Day at Helston or Baring-Gould’s amusing accident on Brown Willy, he had an impressive range of reference and ‘sees what nobody has really bothered to look at for centuries’: the church monuments by forgotten sculptors which, ‘ranged together’, brought their authors to life as artistic personalities; the ...”

“... after speaker attacked Clinton’s use of private email to conduct government business (which Colin Powell, as secretary of state, had also done). It was the primary reason she should go to prison: she had ‘put our national security at risk’; she had made us ‘less safe’. In the recent FBI report that criticised her lack of judgment – which was ...”

“... umbrellas and fake flies. But Deakin is able to share the depths of the balmy chalk streams with brown trout – ‘no greater connoisseurs of fine fresh water’ – for nothing, together with the pike, water voles and crayfish that become his companions in the bullrush pools. ‘I swam right up to a frog, which eyed me, but didn’t dive or even blink. As ...”

“... and demand admiration. Not surprisingly, the catalogue commentary requires the combined efforts of Colin Amery, Mary Lutyens, Jane Brown, John Cornforth, Gavin Stamp and John Summerson to do justice to an architect whose career, in its range, dimensions and achievements, outshines Wren, Vanbrugh and the Adam ...”

“... he never gave his name. The other one was an armed-struggle potter, a woman called Fiona Armour-Brown, who lived in Wales. She was slightly over the top. She believed we should be setting up small terrorist groups – that wasn’t the word used, but that’s effectively what it was – in Wales and parts of Northern England, to challenge Labour. So we ...”