“... the title Channon had longed for.)For Channon, the House of Commons was a ‘club’, a ‘brown, smelly, tawny, male paradise’, and although he and Nicolson were never significant political players, both were keen observers. Nicolson became a devotee of Churchill’s, refusing to join in the chorus of praise when Chamberlain announced that he was ...”

“... not Stalinist terror, was the chief threat Russia faced. Yet Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, remained captive to the fantasy of rolling back communism in Eastern Europe rather than containing it (as Kennan had been advocating). When US propaganda outlets encouraged Hungarian dissidents to rebel against their government, then failed to ...”

“... against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia and has found an influential reader in John McCain, an old-style promoter of American toughness. But it’s now quite hard to imagine Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, not to mention Osama bin Laden and other ‘enemies of the Free World’, quivering at the thought of a ‘concert of ...”

“... using fMRI – notably, Semir Zeki – have pointed art studies in a significant new direction. John Onians and Barbara Maria Stafford, both art historians, certainly think so, though Neuroarthistory and Echo Objects argue the case in quite different ways. What might the far view be, from this new bend in the road? Suppose we could arrive at adequate ...”

“... under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion and reality, but the ideological strains of legitimising overseas conquest. Political Shakespeare ends ...”

“... and a reproduced Camel cigarette packet: ‘from use’. The full works – chocolate-brown cloth, Brainard dustwrapper, author photo (flat cap, jeans, sandals, thumbs-hooked-in-belt) – yours for £1.50. Shamefully good value. You owed it to the poet to make a decent fist of reading the thing. Now, in an era of cut-throat discounts, peel-away ...”

“... died in 1703, the pride of his life – three thousand books, lavishly gilded and bound in brown leather – passed to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he had once been a student. The college had scarcely any record of him apart from a reprimand for ‘having been scandalously overseen in drink’, but that no longer mattered. The bequest included ...”

“... of India: within these loosely-defined parameters were situated schools such as Cathedral and John Connon as well as Campion, colleges like Elphinstone and St Xavier’s, the important office buildings that belonged both to the Government and to private companies, the Bombay Gymkhana club, and the Jaslok and Breach Candy Hospitals. This was where not only ...”

“... a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a perception of the activities of the levelling Labour governments which have come and gone since 1945. But there’s more of that in the second of the books than there is in the ...”

“... else remains. Most of The Sixth Extinction is about dead or dying animals: the great auk, little brown bats, Neanderthals, sea snails, the Sumatran rhino. Such a book should be depressing, but Kolbert’s isn’t, largely because our attention is drawn not just to the work of destruction but also to the work of discovery. The asteroid impact that wiped out ...”

“... powers, but he opens this expanded version of his 2012 Gifford Lectures with a Father Brown story, ‘The Oracle of the Dog’: by howling at a certain time, the animal gives the priestly sleuth the clue to the murder weapon. Chesterton was consciously taking off from an earlier tale, Conan Doyle’s ‘Silver Blaze’, in which a guard dog fails ...”

“... Back-Bone of an Eel’. And then the rabbits began to appear.A local apothecary and obstetrician, John Howard, was the first person outside her immediate circle to examine Toft. He said he felt something ‘leaping’ in her womb. Under his supervision in Guildford, she went on to deliver a large number of dead rabbits, nine in a single day. Howard wrote ...”

“... of essays, mostly attacks on Orwell from the Left. The militants are Malcolm Evans, Alan Brown, Alaric Jacob, Bill Alexander, Robert Stradling, Beatrix Campbell, Deirdre Beddoe, Stephen Sedley, Lynette Hunter, Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now commonplace. Raymond Williams and other writers have been ...”

“... challenger, leave their mark. So do party differences, and not just in matters of policy. Allison Brown, a student of mine at Smith College, discovered that Republican and Democratic acceptance speeches of the Sixties and Seventies took different approaches to ‘sovereignty’. Republicans stressed the ultimate authority of God, which they implicitly ...”

“... powers, as well as for life after death. The first case he quotes is that of ‘a figure in a brown dress with broad lace collar and golden hair’ seen by three persons on separate occasions; he is most excited by cases of ‘collective hallucination’, which are methodically parsed for logical explanation: coincidence, telepathy or supernatural ...”