“... later in its story. ‘The protocol is not to talk about it at all publicly.’ But, as Bonnie Brown, a masseuse at Google in the early days, wrote in her memoir, ‘a sharp contrast developed between Googlers working side by side. While one was looking at local movie times on their monitor, the other was booking a flight to Belize for the weekend. How was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was to be socially as well as musically discordant; it is no accident that the primary business of John Stark, publisher of Scott Joplin’s most famous rags, was the selling of pianos. The arrival of the cheap domestic piano hastened the decline of field songs and ‘spirituals’ among former slaves, but by and large failed to establish a pious white ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mostly extremely dated), his intellectual debts are self-confessedly to ‘Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, and even Agatha Christie’. The imaginary kingdom of Prester John which forms the main theme of Gumilev’s study refers, not to the legend of a Christian king beyond the domains of Islam as it developed in Europe, but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... between priests and laymen on jurisdiction over the other world. When the Civil War came, John Aubrey recalled, ‘Liberty of Conscience and Liberty of inquisition’ arrived too, and ‘the phantoms vanished.’ In characteristically utilitarian fashion, the Society for Psychical Research set about classifying apparitions in terms of whether a ghost ...”

“... He nearly had mother out of her coffin ... He was picking her head up. ‘What’s all this brown stuff?’; ‘try and get her rings off.’ I said: ‘I don’t want to.’ He said: ‘I do.’ He wanted to see her feet, he was opening her dressing gown. ‘It’s incredible,’ he said, ‘doesn’t she look bizarre.’ The kids were screaming and I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... She didn’t call again. After leaving the family she got a job in Waitrose, in the basement of John Barnes in Finchley Road. She worked there for 31 years on the check-out, and they were, Pearl says, unhappiness notwithstanding, ‘the best years of my life’. This is how I met her. She had the longest queues, but still people lined up to have their goods ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the biographies, the inexplicable determination of Kenneth Branagh (of Shackleton) to out-act John Mills (of Scott of the Antarctic), the retellings of modern legends about the explorers freezing and dying and writing poetry as they did so. But Tromsø is almost empty. There seem to be hardly any tourists, though I am told by a smiling woman in the ...”

“... has some ten thousand members. However, as James Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University, reassures us, his colleagues in the discipline have themselves a very defective grasp of American political culture. In particular, Morone believes that political scientists are in thrall to the misguided notion that the classical liberalism ...”