“... hotel across the street from the old casino.’ Alternately drunk and on the phone to Jane Fonda, RWF declines to capitulate to the journalist’s wishes and Katz returns to his Tuscany home: ‘I was not going to win him over and was less sure by the hour that I wanted to.’ The phone rings. Fassbinder wants Katz to do his next ...”

“... Marxist who ran a bookshop in a Nottingham slum in the early Sixties. ‘Women with Bicycle’ by Jane Oxenford and the brief ‘Having taken off my wheels’ by Martin Elliott both associate love and cycling, the first affectedly gloomy and terse, the second too cleverly vivacious. The most valuable juxtaposition pairs two longish stories set in ...”

“... of tea for breakfast: He stirred the milk in the mug, till, turning from clear but dark to pale brown and neutrally uniform, the water had become tea-like, the spoon negotiating the vortex it had set in motion by constantly evading, and sometimes colliding into, the submerged leviathan tea bag. Then he’d retrieved it from the pool on to his spoon, at once ...”

“... the Vegan refused. Later she said: ‘Carmen, I hope your sister wasn’t offended but I only eat brown bread.’ Just before lunch the person who had the sex change was at the nurse’s desk in a flimsy blue nightdress, asking if she could wash her hair. But there’s still no hot water. The nurse was calling her Caroline. She looked very excited about her ...”

“... a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which Lansbury was one of the finest exponents. Despite having a historian for Chancellor and assorted chroniclers of the Party’s history on its back benches, the ...”

“... at the barre in a line that September and noticed the palette, the pinks and the whites, light brown hair, light brown wood, clean-straight lines in the sunlight, and noticed herself, neither long, straight, nor light … she was great at ballet but was no ballerina. So she stopped. Sometimes cultural homogeneity ...”

“... factual piece about the city’s rat population, ‘The Rats on the Waterfront’, he writes: The brown rat is an omnivorous scavenger, and it doesn’t seem to care at all whether its food is fresh or spoiled. It will eat soap, oil paints, shoe leather, the bone of a bone-handled knife, the glue in a book binding, and the rubber in the insulation of ...”

“... apparently willing to countenance the elimination (but not genocide) of the ‘swarms of black and brown’ in the same name of ‘efficiency’. He concedes that Wells ‘equivocated embarrassingly about the Jews’, but then anti-semitism was part of the eugenic philosophy which the writer had picked up second-hand from Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, whose ...”

“... is all of the showbusiness spectacles we have ever known rolled into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple, and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most interesting person on the ...”

“... with his homemade telescope, or Faraday, the blacksmith’s son who came to science by way of Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry (a primer addressed ‘to the public, and more particularly to the female sex’), and whose ‘chief recommendations’ in Davy’s eyes, when he wanted a lab assistant, were ‘punctuality, neatness and sobriety’? An ...”

“... that of the Reverend Thomas Gibson and his wife Mary, for example – have the quality of a Jane Austen happy ending: ordinariness is not glamorised, good feeling is celebrated. The finish and-detail of his paintings often look Dutch, and give good value inch by well-painted inch. Whether he knew Dutch pictures, or whether this is a case of convergent ...”

“... such lurid accounts. Off they went, gentry and servants: ‘Lord and Lady Mount Cashell, Helena Jane and me pack’d in the Family Coach, with Mary Lawless, Mary Smith, Blanchois, and William in another carriage, driving full speed, nine Irish Adventurers, to the French dominions.’ Two at least of these Irish adventurers were as ready as William ...”

“... multiple perspectives, but it circles around three friends who met more than a decade before at Brown. Like most graduates of America’s elite colleges, they are filled with a sense of their own promise. But now that they have turned 30 they are beginning to see that promise might not be enough. The book of cultural criticism that Marina Thwaite had ...”

“... pulls the blanket back further, and discovers a horse’s head at the foot of the bed, its glossy brown nose facing us, glassy eye to the ceiling. I turned back to my brother and asked him how he’d known. ‘The same thing happened in The Simpsons,’ he said. It’s a strange thing to recognise something backwards. When you see that episode of The ...”

“... late Elizabethan doublet with an unusual semi-transparent lace collar. He has fashionably shortish brown hair, a fairly high forehead, bags under his eyes as if he hasn’t been sleeping well lately, and a lightweight, almost fluffy beard and moustache. The top right-hand corner of the painting gives a date – 1603, perfectly consonant with the clothes, the ...”