“... up the steeply banked terraces. But noble as the site appears, it is not entirely benign. The poet John Lucas, in 92 Acharnon Street, reminds us that the old Olympic stadium is where ‘the Colonels assembled schoolchildren for parades so that they might learn to salute the Greek flag.’ Across a never relenting stream of traffic, motorbikes cascading from ...”

“... We learn that Egdon Heath offered him the possibility of ‘unity of place’ and was, ‘as John Bayley astutely suggests, nothing less than “a microcosm of the dark indifferent universe in which human life has to be carried on”.’ It thus ‘becomes the perfect setting for the social, political and intellectual upheavals of the age that the novel ...”

“... the pupils.’ One of the examples she gave was of a boy who coloured a tree trunk red instead of brown. ‘The teacher wished to interfere, saying: “Do you think trees have red trunks?” I held her back and allowed the child to colour the tree red.’ Eventually, after he had spent time looking at trees in the garden, he started to colour the trunks ...”

“... alter some colours in a painting (a red lake fading away, a copper resinate green turning brown), it is possible that the removal of a discoloured varnish will create a discordant effect which outweighs the advantages of returning some portions to their original condition. There is surely no one correct approach for conservators to take. There is one ...”

“... who have kicked over the traces and made good Down South. The novelist and ex-Bingley librarian John Braine of Room at the Top fame will later come into the same category.The only writer she does read with any regularity, though, has nothing to do with the North at all. This is Beverley Nichols, of whose column in Woman’s Own she is a devoted fan, and ...”

“... to Greece. Tony mentions in the poem her absent friends: George Devine, Ron Eyre, Tony Richardson, John and John (Dexter and Osborne), and at the conclusion a cake is brought in and Jocelyn is crowned with laurels. It could be thought pretentious but since Jocelyn is so far from pretentious it seems both fitting and moving.I ...”

“... by no one, still wearing her coat, engrossed by something invisible to anyone else in the ugly brown carpet, which grew more and more intriguing to her as the hour passed and the men about to remove the coffin and put out the lights finally asked her to leave. A letter in the New York Times on 23 December, from a Mr ...”

“... quaffers – in the current book, Shane MacGowan – and scenesters of all professions, the quick brown foxes who understand the game and like to play it: Christopher Hitchens, Michael Winner, Emin again and Jarvis Cocker, whom she wanted to impress so much when he came to her house, she hid the pot-pourri. But she’s a little nervous – though she pretends ...”

“... in the grip of the Cult of Mackintosh, exposing endless reels of film as they gazed at the dark brown sandstone of the Renfrew Street front, really made of the building. Glasgow may be on the pilgrimage route along with Barcelona, Budapest, Nancy, Moscow and Riga, those cities in which strikingly original buildings from the years around 1900 can be ...”

“... from, konbu, an edible variety of kelp. After boiling down the liquid, Ikeda was left with small brown crystals which – eureka! – had the taste he remembered from Germany and recognised in his wife’s marvellous soup.The crystals were a form of glutamic acid, and the soluble salt Ikeda eventually derived from it to deliver the taste he called umami ...”

“... commentary on the Vulgate textus receptus of the day. Thanks to the critical scholarship of Andrew Brown, we have known also since 1985 that Erasmus’s Latin text was not begun in 1505-6 under inspiration from Valla, as was long thought, but composed, as he claimed, under considerable pressure of time during his stay in Basel. Of the three elements contained ...”

“... father more than her mother. She studied at the Slade under the all-powerful trinity of Frederick Brown, Wilson Steer and Tonks. It was 1910, and the students were advised not to attend Roger Fry’s Post-Expressionist exhibition. By 1914 Carrington, a mild bohemian, had cut her hair short, Mark Gertler and C.W. Nevinson were in love with her, and the world ...”

“... and is supported by his sister’s reminiscences. Most of the previous biographers – Hilton Brown (1945), Sir Angus Wilson (1977), Lord Birkenhead (1978) – have accepted the Kiplings’ version as literally true. Certainly no one, not even Charles Carrington, who takes a less literal view in his official biography (1955), has ever seriously maintained ...”

“... and skill at organising forced them into the public consciousness. From 1954, when the NAACP took Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education to the Supreme Court and won its judgment that state education could not be ‘equal’ if it was also ‘separate’, through a decade of Martin Luther King’s non-violent marches, boycotts and sit-ins against Southern ...”

“... and local tycoon. Recently, however, she has taken up with Gavin (‘slenderly-featured’ with ‘brown, black-lashed eyes’). She tells Attercliffe she is giving up Gavin and leaving Maurice. She is coming back to Walton Lane to live with her children and without Attercliffe. Attercliffe disagrees. They have an argument. It is the first of several similar ...”