“... that we are reading an exact, first-hand account from this invisible man? Housman rose, placed a brown-covered small octavo pamphlet (of paged proofs?) upon the reading-desk and immediately began to read. He spoke slowly, with precision, in a pleasant, even, low, but clear and well-modulated voice, not raising his eyes, and frequently twitching the pamphlet ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... stick.But​ Penney was answerable to the American in charge of the Anzio operation, Major General John Lucas, who answered to the American Lieutenant General Mark Clark (whose troops nicknamed him Marcus Aurelius Clarkus for the Roman imperial hauteur of his manner), who answered to the British General Sir Harold Alexander, who answered to Winston ...”

“... an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008. In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sister Line, My Brother Lanoé’). She finished her first two plays, Un rat qui passe and John et Joe, in 1972. John et Joe, about two middle-aged idlers and the lottery ticket passed between them, was performed first, in 1975, at a dinner theatre in Neuchâtel. In many ways it’s an outlier: the dialogue shares ...”

“... for the next attempt to regenerate national pride. The early omens weren’t good. Weight picks up John O’Farrell’s story about her election as Conservative Party leader in 1976, when she appeared in front of the cameras and gave a ‘V’ for victory sign the wrong way round. ‘She was smiling and telling the British people to fuck off at the same ...”

“... and distributed by a state organisation with a no-nonsense Attlee-era moniker, redolent of brown paper envelopes and blotched stencils and corridors smelling of disinfectant: the Central Electricity Generating Board, the CEGB. Littlechild suggested splitting the National Grid off from the power-generating side of the CEGB, privatising regional ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC ...”