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“... didn’t even need democracy: fellow-feeling would have been enough. My great-great-grandfather John Low, arguing against Lord Dalhousie’s proposal to annex Nagpur in 1854, recalled from his experience all over India cases of our having suffered heavy losses in revenue, and very extensive losses in human lives, owing to the want of wealth among our native ...”

“... the marginal social acceptability of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, whose hand, ‘holding the teacup, was very brown, and very, very wrinkly with the soap-suds; and all through her gown and her cap there were hairpins sticking wrong end out; so that Lucie didn’t like to sit too near her.’ Both these essays show off Davenport’s range and gusto, his feats of ...”

“... just finished Ashley Kahn’s absorbing history of a date, ‘A Love Supreme’: The Creation of John Coltrane’s Classic Album.* Trane was a nice sheets-of-sound antidote to the ormolu, love-nests and scheming courtiers of the Ancien Régime. Yet despite having a workable assortment of Mulligans and Bakers and Konitzes, I was also feeling vaguely ...”

“... as the Lucas van Leyden, a painting I find ravishing but can’t find much to say about, is John Sell Cotman’s Greta Bridge, a watercolour in the British Museum. I was brought up on Cotman, in that they have a very good collection of his work in Leeds, most of it bequeathed by Sidney Kitson, who was so fond of the artist he was said to suffer from ...”

“... would do, employed the same word many times on one page, repeated myself, started the hero with brown eyes and fair hair, and changed these, quite unknowingly, to fair eyes and brown hair by the 40th page. I lost track of the plot. Someone killed stone-dead early on by a lorry would turn up alive on page 100. The chaotic ...”

“... Valley, East London would be unendurable. Victoria Park, the Lea, the Thames: tame country, old brown gods. They preserve our sanity. The Lea is nicely arranged – walk as far as you like then travel back to Liverpool Street from any one of the rural halts that mark your journey. Railway shadowing river, a fantasy conjunction; together they define an ...”

“... dumb books as clumsy in their way as the Rozetti stone’ in the punning words of Robert Carlton Brown, a maker of what on the evidence of McGann’s examples must be handmade books of exemplary jokiness). Unreadability, McGann says, can be a virtue. The poems of Emily Dickinson, unpublished in her lifetime, test editorial practice. McGann’s account of ...”

“... are written, as it were, from their end of the table. It would have been fun if, say, George Brown had also kept a diary. But each of the existing versions has its strong points for future scholarship. Barbara Castle, a former newspaper reporter, has professional shorthand, so that her quotes can be relied on. Tony Benn has a Boswellian fetish about ...”

“... full literary-historical context. Last year the Thomas marriage suffered trial by LRB letter-page. John Pikoulis accused Jonathan Barker of editorially fudging his contentions that ‘the breach between [Helen] and Edward was final,’ and that he effectively deserted her for the muse of war. Pikoulis rested his case on an assertion by Lawrance ...”

“... circus-masters developed a habit of giving to ordinary dwarfs the name of Lilliputians). Captain John Biddel, who brought Gulliver back from Lilliput in his ship, was apparently not so scrupulous as Gulliver. According to T.H. White, he brought away quantities of Blefuscan and Lilliputian people for exhibition ‘among the Fair Grounds of the Kingdom’, but ...”

“... that she must have made herself part of the furniture. It is duly noted that the menu has a brown and gold border. It is unduly noted that the menu has the date printed at the bottom. Admittedly such a thing would not happen at the nearest branch of the Golden Egg, but it is not necessarily the mark of a great restaurant. Mrs Krantz would probably hate ...”

“... spirit and inclination, I feel all Maori.’ When Kerewin goes to a Maori-frequented bar, ‘the brown faces stare at her with bright unfriendly eyes’ and she wants to ‘whip out a certified copy of her whakapapa’, so that she can say: ‘Look! I am really one of you.’ A man ‘comes across and hongis’. (A whakapapa is a genealogy, and to hongi is ...”

“... paving of Venetian churches – as well as thousands of bathrooms throughout the world. The dark brown or grey-green fossiliferous marble from Purbeck in Dorset that was much used in English medieval architecture and sculpture is also a limestone. Barry notes that Master Henry of Avranches, the cosmopolitan 13th-century Latin poet and secular priest, likened ...”

“... Panther party militant and the festival along with it: ‘I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison.’ (Like Hoffman, Pete Townshend went off-message from ‘the spirit of Woodstock’ at that point. ‘Fuck off!’ he announced. ‘Fuck off my fucking stage!’) But Lang never imagined the festival as a political event and it ...”

“... Museum) and the National Gallery. Piero della Francesca was a figure of special interest for both John Charles Robinson, an agent for South Kensington as well as for private collectors, and Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery, because of the extreme rarity of his portable pictures. There was only one work by him in any public – or ...”