“... 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 ...”

“... in which women were described and rated like horses: ‘Perfectly sound in wind and limb. A fine Brown girl rising nineteen . . . Fit for High Keeping with a Jew Merchant.’ When Wellington left Wilson to go off to the Peninsular War, his campaign orders included the instruction that ‘there shall be six women to every hundred men and these shall be drawn ...”

“... microscope, he carved and painted sculptures measurable in microns and millimetres; his Pope John Paul IIholds a cross crafted from a hair divided into sixths, making its width slightly less than the diameter of two red blood cells. His portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, whose diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl ...”

“... with approval: ‘the fact that you were always a little bit healthily cold, and yet you had brown bread’ appealed to a temperament of which high thinking and plain living were to be enduring characteristics. After one glass of white wine had been poured, Clapp remembers ruefully, the bottle would be recorked and put back in the fridge. Clearly ...”

“... back for a good long while. I don’t know that he’s still not over it. Fifty Septembers ago, John Steinbeck set out across America with his old standard poodle Charley as company. It was election season, as it was this September: Nixon-Kennedy. Steinbeck was 58, younger than the Maestro and myself, and near the end of his life. One can feel it in his ...”

“... the sun-set through the haze, waiting for the boat. Fishermen poled their pirogues onto the brown strip of beach. A couple of women slouched over baskets of mangos. A boy wandered by to ask for money, then posed for a photo, droop-lidded and smirking, his dog-tags glinting in the twilight. Shiny SUVs with corporate insignia piled up along the loading ...”

“... things, the phone went. It was Jason Jenson, known to the police as Wet-Dog, his old friend from Brown, former drug-pusher, cat-burglar, mail fraudster and insurance scam artist, one-time inmate of Lorton penitentiary, now a computer whizz kid with EkaSystems Inc, and earning at least half a million a year . . . Alas, much of Zadie Smith’s second novel ...”

“... subjected to similar treatment. In January, he wrote an open letter to Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Condoleezza Rice and the president of the European Parliament. The letter, which remains unanswered, explained the real reasons for Musharraf’s actions: At the outset you may be wondering why I have used the words ‘claiming to be the head of ...”

“... peas are yellow and wrinkled, others green and round, or why one person has blue eyes, another brown. Development, though, was a science of similarities, asking for instance why humans, in their trajectory from fertilised egg to adult, are generally bilaterally symmetrical, each with two eyes, two arms terminating in five-fingered hands. An attempt to ...”