“... 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 ...”

“... Samson and Delilah, and wore a spangly bikini top, the better to cling on to the shoe-polish-brown chest of Victor Mature as Samson, in full, glorious Technicolor. Even with her clothes buttoned up, however, Hedy Lamarr carried the frisson of having once been prepared to strip naked on film. Even though few in America had seen Ecstasy, it continued to ...”

“... get dinner at 1 a.m. after an evening at the theatre. He praised its ‘red-hot chops, with their brown, frizzling caudal appendages sobbing hot tears of passionate fat’. In How They Dined Us in 1860 and How They Dine Us Now, published in 1900, Clement Scott argued that forty years earlier ‘they dined us … clumsily and coarsely, and the women were left ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... equal to the human population at the time. His great enemy was Rattus norvegicus, the Norwegian or brown rat, which was believed to have arrived in Britain on Scandinavian trading ships in the 18th century. In fact, Rattus norvegicus probably came to Europe from northern China. Its ferocity and adaptability meant that it soon displaced its smaller and more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... masters, especially Tallis (1989) and Josquin (1993), and an influential recording of Bach’s St John Passion (1991). For the Bach recordings, Parrott employed no more than two singers on each of the chorus parts and used the same singers for the arias. This was a response to traditional choral society performances, which tended to deploy a full ...”

“... Among philosophers​ of the 20th century, John Langshaw Austin is not a cultural celebrity like Heidegger, Russell, Sartre or Wittgenstein. But for a period after the Second World War, he was the leading figure of the school of ordinary language philosophy that dominated Oxford, achieved substantial influence in the wider Anglophone world and left its stamp for a much longer time on the way analytic philosophers work, think and write ...”

“... FIFTH BOMB IS FOUND IN MADRID. And to complete the triptych: CHESSMAN REPRIEVE FOR 60 DAYS BY BROWN AFTER PLEAs BY URUGUAY. CONVICT HAD GIVEN UP HOPE AFTER 12 YEARS. The Burroughs re-edit is dictated by his choice of material. But the strategic cut-up has already been carried out by sub-editors, typesetters. Gysin, as practising magician, trance ...”