“... 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 ...”

“... in two whopping instalments of hundreds of euros each. And it comes as part of the electricity bill. If Greeks don’t pay it, the government says, their power will be cut. Just as Britons used the phrase ‘poll tax’ rather than the government’s preferred ‘council tax’, Greeks have started referring to their new burden by the same name as the ...”

“... Liberalism, and many of its founders’ lives reflected the eclecticism of that old cause. Gavin Brown Clark ran away from his bourgeois Glasgow home at thirteen, living in India, Australia and London before working as a surgeon in Edinburgh; by the 1880s, this ‘inveterate joiner of organisations’ had become dedicated to temperance, land reform and the ...”

“... his ground’; Eric Garner, a 44-year-old in Staten Island killed in a police chokehold; Michael Brown, an 18-year-old shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri; Walter Scott, a 50-year-old father of four in North Charleston, South Carolina, who was Tasered and then killed by a police officer who had stopped him for a nonfunctioning brake ...”

“... novella That Summer (1943), the culmination of his early development, a young farm worker called Bill moves to the city at the depths of the Depression. He stays afloat in his emotional life, first with Ted, a ‘nuggety’ youth he swims naked and ‘fools about’ with, then with an older man, Terry, whom he chums to the races, and the pub, and ...”

“... lyrical, wistful moments with eruptions of extreme violence: A yellow bird With a yellow bill Was perched upon My windowsill I lured him in With a piece of bread And then I smashed His fucking head … The plot is simple but momentous, told as a series of fragmented episodes, foreshadowing the pivotal tragedy, or exploring its traumatic ...”

“... Mr Zank​ was quite short, maybe five three with a wide waist for his size, somewhat wavy brown hair, about fifty, looked directly at you when he spoke with soft remnants of a Polish accent. He worked in the Garment Center, took the BMT subway into Manhattan every day and at weekends had a part-time job at a boardwalk hot dog spot two blocks from where we lived in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn ...”

“... houses had been.Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from KensingtonOn​ the opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are loud, foul-mouthed, almost ...”

“... Too sceptical to make anything as crass as an indictment, he has nevertheless delivered a true bill, and it is a bill of mortality. This grave purpose alone, never mind the art of the writing, should wipe out jibes about soap opera. To make a comparison with another long, many-volumed family chronicle, we should try ...”

“... colour’ she assigns to the period – 1945-60 – is a foggy sort of greyish brown. Dickens’s monumental fog in Bleak House is perhaps correctly reckoned by Nead to be metaphorical. She doesn’t state what it’s a metaphor for. Presumably the torpid, sclerotic chaos of Chancery. But the impasto fog and smog (a coinage not made till ...”

“... at the port of London: a page for every person in England. Most of it was probably low-quality brown paper used as a packing material to protect foodstuffs and ceramics as they juddered along cartways into the city. A small amount, some 3500 sheets, was the ornamental paper used for decorations at feasts and known as papiri depicti (Chaucer refers to ...”

“... for publicity. He chaired the organisation for just a year before being succeeded by H. Rap Brown, a reckless provocateur. In 1968, Carmichael himself was expelled. By the early 1970s, SNCC had disappeared.After Lewis left SNCC, he worked for various philanthropic and social justice organisations, and between 1970 and 1977 directed the Voter Education ...”

“... humour.’ After spending the harsh winter of 1885 digging ditches, Tesla met two men – Alfred Brown, a senior official in the Western Union telegraph company, and the lawyer Charles Peck – who helped him to become a major force in the War of the Currents. Impressed by his capability and charisma, Brown and Peck went ...”

“... America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been sharing with Keats since Tom’s death nearly two years before. No one would come with Keats to the warm climate his doctors prescribed. Keats’s friends had urgent ...”

“... being mainly bound up with emotional and poetic concerns. The other is a little-known book by Bob Brown, a New York journalist who celebrated the life of the ‘slackers’ – as the drop-outs and draft-dodgers of the day were known – in a fictionalised memoir called You Gotta Live, published in 1932. In this, Cravan appears as Rex Johns and Loy as ...”