“... or ‘neo-authoritarian’, what is indisputable is that it has unleashed what John Ganz has called a sense of ‘moral anarchy’, in which there are no longer any limits to the expression of sadism, or to its implementation as policy. Children are forcibly separated from their parents. Migrants from Venezuela are flown to a concentration ...”

“... Schuyler had an inkling. Having been introduced to the audience at the Dia Art Foundation by John Ashbery, he read from his newly published Selected Poems, on the back cover of which Ashbery’s blurb declared: ‘Schuyler is simply the best we have.’He began the reading that night with the first poem he ever published, ‘Salute’, written in 1951 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a braided rug, a tear in the screen door, a bust of Brahms, the water oiling itself between brown riverbanks. Under the tutelage of Mary Tucker, perhaps the first woman she ever loved romantically, she practised the piano for hours a day, repeating the same tricky passages until she was a general menace to the neighbourhood. After a bout of rheumatic ...”

“... not far from the President’s House, the third presidential mansion, where George Washington and John Adams lived, and a tourist destination for those who don’t leave colonial tours shaking the experience out of their heads as if in imitation of the Liberty Bell, Philly’s cracked symbol of freedom. For years, the historical society responsible for the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”