“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dead germs into the Good Body!’). Pamela (‘most rural of them all’, as her would-be suitor John Betjeman had it, for which read ‘sweet and dull’) met Hitler, too. Asked about him later, she said: ‘Very ordinary, like an old farmer in a brown suit,’ but went into ecstasies over the delicious new potatoes that ...”

“... it ‘a terrible thing to be a woman’, on a visit to London in 1914 found herself in front of John Opie’s portrait of Wollstonecraft: ‘I wanted so desperately to know how other women had saved their souls alive. And the woman in the little frame arrested me, this woman with the auburn hair, and the sad, steady, light-...”

“... as both shadow leader of the house and shadow Welsh secretary. Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, have also been abandoned by several of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who tweeted ‘he has no economic policies’). Corbyn’s former policy chief, Neale ...”

“... of metal pipes, wires and wood’. He notes ‘a reproachful gleam from one of its great brown eyes’. The creature is both monstrous and puzzling: how foolish can a notion get? Months later, in England, the question arises again, when a publisher wants to know if his book will lay bare ‘the Soul of Africa’. ‘It was as if the electronic ...”

“... life he made for himself. In California, his wife says, he fell back when not dining out on the ‘brown foods’ of his boyhood-sausages, kidneys, Worcester sauce, mulligatawny soup. Tastes and attitudes formed in his schooldays shaped what he became, assisting him in some ways, limiting him in others. His wife’s book is a moving personal story and a ...”