“... there shouldn’t have been any left. But of course there were, and are, plenty of them. The late Bryan Wilson, a taxonomist of sects, was reduced to inventing a special category for the Quakers, a sect which should have turned into a denomination but obstinately refused to do so. Endogamy had something to do with that. Among my many Quaker relations I recall ...”

“... of his time because they did not understand the rudiments of their traditional poetic lore’. ‘Bryan Johnson, isn’t it?’ asked Coe. And then he found Johnson’s own copy of Graves’s book, with that passage underlined. A pleasant reward for a conscientious though temporary biographer, who can now get on with his ...”

“... contacts he had with Richard III and also Edward IV, effected through a spiritualist medium called Bryan Gibson. During these long-range interviews, Richard apparently told Dening via Gibson that the princes had indeed been smothered in the Tower, though this had not been his intention. Although this news from the Other Side would seem to explode Baldwin’s ...”

“... tribute to Woolf I had come across on this side of the pond (a response to Fade Out) was by J.H. Prynne – to whom Frank Zappa is dedicated and who, according to the author blurb, supervised Watson at Gonville and Caius. (Mr Prynne, I’m told, doesn’t have much use for fiction: Patrick White excepted.) Poetry was struck off in the Eighties. Now ...”

“... that I’d spoken in good faith. When the case came to court, I found Roland Penrose and Bryan Robertson there as potential expert witnesses. The only one of us to be called was Robertson. He proceeded to give a speech which was stunning in its authority and lucidity, a quiet, patient, courteous, relentless demolition of philistinism. It turned the ...”

“... second novel, won him attention and execration in about equal measure. The dedicatee was one ‘J.T.’ Just a few feet away from that marble slab in Rock Creek, one can discover a small grey stone with the inscription ‘James Trimble III. 1925-1945. Iwo Jima’. And here the quest is over. Vidal intends to be buried as near as he can be to his first and ...”

“... orders is better than fucking,’ was an often-heard mafia saying. Walter is played by Bryan Cranston, previously best known for comedy roles – the father in Malcolm in the Middle and the dentist Tim Whatley in Seinfeld. Walter White is, for Cranston, a great mid-life unfolding of talent meeting opportunity: the challenge of a part within a ...”

“... being loved.’ The various men on whom in the course of time she seems to have placed her hopes (Bryan Proctor, Aubrey Beauclerk, John Howard Payne, Washington Irving, Prosper Mérimée) tended to want too much from her, remain elusive or abruptly marry someone else. Most depressing of all was her late romantic fixation on the Italian adventurer Ferdinando ...”

“... to sustain an increasingly expensive lifestyle. Joan was a great shopper, as was their daughter, JC, who now needed a Manhattan apartment to pursue a career as a socialite and would-be actor. ‘I’ll see to it that you and Joanie will never have to want for anything as long as you live,’ Goodman told Lee while selling his empire to Cadence ...”

“... to persuade the woman via a threat of force was a mistake. Citing a rhetorical prescription from Bryan Garner, who compiled the Oxford Dictionary of Modern American Usage, Wallace brought his 17,000 words on the usage wars to a close on a note that melded hortatory optimism with experiential pragmatism. Imagine the phrase needlepointed into a pillow, or ...”

“... that amid all the Genet references, Mingus namedrops and mime moves, the likes of Bolan, Bowie and Bryan Ferry were very much in love with, and shaped by, mainstream British showbiz and Saturday night TV. Recall: Lulu singing ‘The Man Who Sold the World’. Recall: Bryan Ferry duetting with Cilla (‘and special guests ...”

“... Dreyfus does in his recent discussion of ‘Husserl, Heidegger and Modern Existentialism’ in Bryan Magee’s The Great Philosophers. He begins by outlining Heidegger’s claim that the relation of thinking subject to thought object does not adequately describe our most common relation to things. What Dreyfus calls our ‘everyday masterful, practical ...”

“... Like so many young ruined Parisians before him he’d fallen in with a dodgy Spanish poet – J.P. Contamine de Latour, real name José Maria Vicente Ferrer Francisco de Paola Patricio Manuel Contamine, from Tarragona. Years later, Latour managed to piece together the following recollection: ‘We didn’t eat every day, but we never missed an aperitif. I ...”

“... child, Britney was both self-sufficient and eager for attention. She doted on her older brother, Bryan, and her baby sister, Jamie Lynn. Britney’s talent for singing and dancing was apparent from the age of four. Lynne took her to dance classes, gymnastics, singing competitions and TV auditions; when Britney landed a role on The All New Mickey Mouse ...”

“... more sympathetic and arranged for Keith Roberts, who knew the details of the Ward proposal, and Bryan Taylor, who had just joined the Aldermaston staff, to continue work on two-stage radiation implosion devices. They were assisted in the design work by the recruitment of several members of the Harwell fast reactor team; and by 1957 they had designed a ...”