“... and has the ninth largest economy – who grew up not just working-class but poor. His biographer John French points out that Lula learned to read when he was ten, didn’t always have enough to eat, left school at twelve, and came from the impoverished, stigmatised north-east of the country, with the accent to prove it. Class and regional identification were ...”

“... in the Austenesque way (‘to be sensible of something’); refers to Pushkin being in ‘a brown study’ and suffering from ‘the ague’; and mentions that Pushkin and his boisterous mates one night ‘kicked up a terrible bobbery’. This is a big book, but it has a rakish, propulsive air, not unlike Pushkin’s glittering short novels and ...”

“... bones’ and he was ‘incessantly smoking cigarettes, the long fingers straying to the straggling brown moustache’. Crane smoked as if cigarettes alone were keeping him alive. ‘He could not talk,’ a niece wrote, ‘unless he was walking up and down the room with his hands stuffed into his pockets and a cigarette balanced on his lips.’ It is this niece ...”

“... Hall, which opened in 1612, was an imposing three-storey house standing at the bottom end of St John’s Street, not far from Smithfield market. When it was built the street had to be rerouted around it, which did not please the residents, and one of the first to appear at the new court was a local apothecary’s wife, Grace Watson, charged with ‘giving ...”

“... UK expelled a few of each other’s diplomats. Their secret services stopped co-operating. Gordon Brown refused all meetings with Putin. In London, Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, was told by the Foreign Office to sit tight and wait while the UK tried to find a way to extradite the killers through back-channel negotiations. In 2010 she was still waiting. When ...”

“... that sort of tan & wrinkles. Like a reptile – though not squamous, not unpleasant. Lively brown eyes.’ Henry Williamson, whom Hughes admired, he describes in a letter to his brother, Gerald, saying he made a mess of his life ‘with Hitlerism’, but has an amazing knowledge of wildlife, ‘though he is a bit of an old sod.’He is more critical of ...”

“... airport paperback – one has Pity the Nation, another has Harry Potter, another has Dan Brown. But the texts keep morphing into Arabic in front of the readers’ eyes: انجيلينا   Angelina بانانا   Banana تيتيكاكا   Titicaca ‘All the travellers’ books, to their great consternation, are intruded upon by the Arabic ...”

“... volumes: the three Forster codices in the V&A (formerly owned by Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster), for instance, actually contain five notebooks. The largest concentration of notebooks is in the Institut de France in Paris; they arrived in France en masse in the 1790s, Napoleonic booty expropriated from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Others are in ...”

“... or, lower down the scale, theorists of humanitarian intervention from Harvard or Princeton like John Ruggie and Michael Doyle, speaks for itself. But since the real work of the UN is the manufacture not of actions but of legitimations, the two key figures were the set’s ventriloquists, who wrote the speeches and articles furbishing the secretary-general ...”

“... Change involved the sudden right of people brought up on roast beef to eat only raw carrots and brown rice, or people raised in the Church of England and the old Empire to talk freely to mad old Indians. Change involved the right of George Bernard Shaw to say that the long lying-in-state of the dead queen was a danger to public health, and for the slow ...”

“... of its offices: ‘At this location, 122 Commerce Street, was a very large warehouse owned by John Murphey, who provided support to the slave traders in the city.’ ‘I would have preferred not to have the additional markers,’ the mayor confessed, ‘but I believe they are part of history.’ He agreed to allow them, he said, because they would ...”

“... every footnote, stuffing the commentary with post-its, triple-underlining phrases like ‘his brown shoes’, only pausing occasionally to see the white fountain of remixed and continuous life that John Shade saw when his heart stopped. Nabokov sets up problems to which it seems there should be answers, but he does not ...”

“... editor of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, who came out that year as a Holocaust revisionist; John Zerzan, a hermit who thought language was the root of the world’s problems; and L. Susan Brown, who held that anarchists should support Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that ‘there is no such thing as ...”

“... early 1980s were fronted by gay men, Steve Strange, Jimmy Somerville, Pete Burns, Boy George, Leee John, Morrissey, Billy Mackenzie, Holly Johnson and Marc Almond among them.Not since the Supremes and Diana Ross had a pop group produced a lead singer so clearly destined for solo success. ‘Careless Whisper’, though co-written with Ridgeley, had shown that ...”

“... would be seen through its ogival windows. What bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal ...”