“... us) because the towers appear brightly lit against an ominous sky. The girl’s hair – half dark brown, half platinum blonde, divided neatly down the middle – echoes the light and shade of the buildings, the stripes of darker and lighter brick. The wisp of blonde hair lies against the dark hair like a single, painterly stroke. There is contingency even in ...”

“... dying herself at 30. The ‘moonlight shades’ and their mother stand for the women, black and brown, whose near invisibility, yet absolute centrality to the system of slavery, speak to the silences of the archive and the work of recovery that remains to be done.* Eliza, Matilda and Allan Williams are three of the 360 children of mixed heritage – mainly ...”

“... most active in this choice were the most powerful people in Europe: Merkel, Sarkozy and Gordon Brown. With the new constitution of the EU two possibilities were opened. Because the executive power was largely dependent on how the representatives were chosen and who they were the executive power could be either very strong or very weak. We went for the weak ...”

“... its very favourable treatment of Scotland bought the Union another couple of decades. Gordon Brown’s numbers show ecoomic problems looming for the UK in general – and the Scottish statistics are even worse. A European survey found in September 2001 that the UK had a long-term absent-through-sickness quotient of 7 per cent against 2.1 per cent in ...”

“... French, but Italian maybe. Harry made himself up as a yogi, dressed in white robes and wearing brown facepaint. He sat cross-legged on a mat, sprinkled seeds into a shallow dish of soil and began to chant while Dash accompanied on a lyre. The seeds sprouted and began to twist towards the sky. Encouraged by an enthusiastic reception, back in New York the ...”

“... at your peril. Certainly, Labour’s Scottish frontbenchers – Robin Cook (especially), Gordon Brown, Donald Dewar and, of course, John Smith himself – have a terse, combative Parliamentary style light-years from Mr Kinnock’s and this has earned them a grudging but general respect. Mr Smith was also thought (and plainly was) a thoroughly ...”

“... of Beyond the Pale, her study of the difficulty white feminists have had in being fair to brown races which appear to oppress their women, as ‘a journalist and feminist design consultant’. Footnote 17 on page 256 enlightens. Ware, I discover, is the co-author of At Women’s Convenience: A Handbook on the Design of Women’s Public Toilets. A ...”

“... programme.The threat that Maryam recognises in Tahera’s dad isn’t just the internet safety bill he’s campaigning for, but his looks: he’s the kind of brown that white people like. Newspapers gush about his ‘caramel skin and long lashes’. Shamsie is at her most nuanced when writing about the subtleties of ...”

“... from song-thrush and cuckoo which I heard only. The ground was peopled by their nests and eggs: brown-blotched seagreen of a black-backed gull inside the circular foundation of a ruined cairn; black-spotted brown of a snipe, which fled away in zig-zags when I went for an early morning wash in the burn; ...”

“... a private equity multimillionaire and ardent global free-marketeer who used to hang out with Bill Clinton and once sat on the stage at Davos with Bill Gates and the head of the World Health Organisation. He was on the board of the Business and Sustainable Development Commission and the United Nations Global ...”

“... William Jefferson (‘Bill’) Clinton is not the man from Hope for nothing. And the major story in the American media this election year recounts his resurrection from the politically dead. Indeed, Clinton’s rise is matched in American history only by the equally spectacular fall of George (‘Desert Storm’) Bush, the collapse that put the Arkansas Governor in the White House in the first place ...”

“... underplayed, it’s worth remembering that the party’s share of the vote was lower under Gordon Brown in 2010 and Ed Miliband in 2015. In terms of seats and numbers, the Conservatives did worse in both 1997 and 2001. The liberal commentariat that was hoping that the Lib Dems would replace Labour as the main party of opposition must be even more disappointed ...”

“... When we decided to find Angel, ‘the little one’, who’s deaf-mute and has one blue eye, one brown, his mother said he’d gone to Pinar del Río to stay with an aunt for the holidays. We decided to go out there ourselves, but when we went back to his house to get his aunt’s address before making the trip we found he’d already returned. When I asked ...”

“... the repeal of the estate tax contributed only about a tenth. The compromises needed to get the bill passed meant that the estate tax could only be wound down in stages, with final repeal coming into effect in 2010. Moreover, the bill as a whole included a sunset clause, which requires all its measures to be revoked in ...”

“... Waldorf (‘the route of choice for American presidents and their wives’) and straight in to see Bill and Hillary Clinton. ‘I arrived about five minutes later, to find Bill holding Leo and generally cooing, although my son’s red face showed that he had clearly been exercising his lungs until very recently. André gave ...”