“... he said, “I want a new one.” The one he wanted cost £900. We bought it.’Nicholas Paget-Brown​ , who was then the leader of the council, lives alone not far from the Fulham Road. His gentle manners precede him, in the style of a decently prepped, slightly fogeyish man of the 1950s, and he acts as if he might find the modern world fascinating were ...”

“... my father smoked quite heavily and his fingers were stained like this by cigarettes – and a nice brown it was, and one which I wouldn’t mind seeing on the wall; if he were alive still and the man he was when I was ten I could take him along to Cornelissen where I’m sure they could match his fingers in water, oil or acrylic. And it stirs another memory ...”

“... the title Channon had longed for.)For Channon, the House of Commons was a ‘club’, a ‘brown, smelly, tawny, male paradise’, and although he and Nicolson were never significant political players, both were keen observers. Nicolson became a devotee of Churchill’s, refusing to join in the chorus of praise when Chamberlain announced that he was ...”

“... against, no, with, living with, existing alongside and part of,/the helter-skelter of rust brown, of swift indecipherables’. This is a vital part of the way Schuyler wanted – needed – to see the world, and himself within it. Watching the snowflakes from his window one Christmas Eve, he observed that ‘there’s a lot of twisting, turning, gusts ...”

“... introduced in order to clarify the work’s intricate design. In her Cambridge edition from 2014, Anne Fernald established that, as befits a work originally known as ‘The Hours’, there were meant to be twelve sections. Mendelson provides an extensive note on the text which sifts the evidence for his choices. It’s hard to imagine that any future editor ...”

“... wife. In Scotland she is also known for music criticism, for collaborations with the sculptor Anne Bevan and as the librettist to Sally Beamish’s opera Monster (2002). And she is also a committed practitioner of the short story: her main collections, Blood (1991) and Where You Find It (1996), relate subtle, sometimes frightening and often funny ...”

“... way her hands rested down like that, exactly like the way my hands rested down on top of the dark brown lid of the till when there was no one there and nothing for me to do, so even though my small breasts did not resemble her large dusky-looking ones at all, my hands were like hers, exactly like hers, and I couldn’t help but believe that the Russian man ...”

“... Major E. A. Belcher – an eccentric tyrant, later caricatured by Agatha in The Man in the Brown Suit – to join, as financial adviser, a mission to the Dominions which would drum up publicity for the forthcoming Empire Exhibition of 1924. The mission left for South Africa on board the RMS Kildonan Castle in January 1922; Agatha went along for the ...”

“... churning up dust. In vast, windowless sheds specialising in Logistics. In geometric stacks of red, brown and blue containers: HAMBURG SÜD, HANJIN, MOL. Like a monumental Paul Klee hammered out in steel. In Thatcher’s day it seemed a ground-level manifestation of what I took to be her vision of enterprise: deranged scams, small businesses wiped out. And the ...”

“... a lot of time staring at Hilliard, who stood just ‘two yards’ away, a spruce figure with curly brown hair and a lofty manner not quite fitting for a picture-maker. His courtesies, delivered in an accent bearing traces of broad Devonshire, gave way to long discomfiting silences as he worked his magic with the ‘pencil’, a superfine paintbrush of ...”

“... successful moments, walks straight into two of the tales. Above all, he is not just read, as Laura Brown read Woolf in The Hours, making but not quite making Woolf’s tragic story her own. Or named, as Clarissa is named for Mrs Dalloway, making her party for the Aids-stricken Richard a reprise. In fact, in Specimen Days, Whitman is not read at all. He is ...”

“... the light slants into rooms that face south-west: into this room across a bookcase so the dead-brown gold-stamped spines look to be those to take down now: Hodge and His Masters, The Cereals of America. If a leaf of gold were beaten to transparency and all that here roots and extrudes were tarnished silver and blackened bronze – bumped and brushed ...”

“... it, and tonight, returning from the opera, we are mortified to find we are too late for supper. Anne Vaughan, our organiser, braves the kitchen and eventually a waitress takes pity on us and gives us some bread and ham and a bit of dog-eared salad which we take upstairs in plastic bags. ‘You must be very hungry,’ says a man in the lift. ‘What country ...”

“... where they arrived at around 12.30 to find Knox, a pretty blonde girl, and Sollecito – tall, brown-haired, with glasses – loitering outside. Barbie Nadeau, the author of Angel Face: The True Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox (2010), says that they had a mop and bucket with them. In fact, Knox had taken a mop round to Sollecito’s apartment that ...”

“... tang of the hot dog and pizza concession under the hot yellow lights.’‘One’, the Princess Anne pronoun, is a rare visitor to contemporary literary prose, not only because of its air of neutral authority – it’s just the sort of thing that makes the editorial blue pencil itch. By disowning subjectivity it more or less disqualifies itself, yet ...”