“... In​ 1889 Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, a 72-year-old professor at the Collège de France, wrote a letter to the Lancet in which he reported the effects of injecting himself with guinea pig semen. The results were remarkable. He could once more lift heavy weights, no longer had to hold the banister when going down the stairs and his youthful vigour had returned in other areas too ...”

“... policy will be ‘fashioned in co-operation with the trade unions’ (shades of 1964 and George Brown) and will promote information technology and biotechnology (‘the white heat of a new industrial revolution’ revived). But he then shows a lack of coherence that suggests that he neither understands nor cares. Labour ‘should become a party of sound ...”

“... to put together an anthology of Parliamentary applications for Private Eye’s Order of the Brown Nose would stumble before long on an obsequious supplementary question from David Evans, one of the very first Tories to make a million out of privatisation (in his case from rubbish collection). Again and again, at Prime Minister’s Question Time, the ...”

“... red trees sleeping, hear What I swear now, as John did: To praise lovelong, the living and the brown dead,                             I seek, As climate seeks its style, to write Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight, Cold as the curled wave, ordinary As a tumbler of island water and in collection after collection he has ...”

“... hold hearings on Obama’s nominee. The consequences have already been dramatic.Texas’s Senate Bill 8, or SB8, makes it illegal for a doctor to perform an abortion if they either detect cardiac activity in an embryo or fail to perform a test to detect such activity. The law makes no exception for victims of rape. (Governor Greg Abbott reasoned that ...”

“... self-made billionaires. It took Tony Blair to manage that (deregulation, baby), and in 2008 Gordon Brown introduced ‘golden visas’, which allowed swathes of high-net-worth individuals to enjoy what modern Britain had to offer. By 2013, the number one spot on the Rich List was held by Alisher Usmanov, the Russian metals magnate, with Roman Abramovich at ...”

“... cliché, echoed privately by the Shadow Chancellor and one-time Mandelson intimate, Gordon Brown, that Mandelson is Labour’s real deputy leader. His grip on strategy and policy direction, as well as campaigning and presentation, is increasingly tight. When Mandelson mutters that he is unhappy, say, with Labour plans to abolish compulsory competitive ...”

“... recognition, globalisation à la Nato has been a peppery dish. There were several chefs involved: Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and their exemplar Tony Blair. They all wanted to convert the populace to an enlightened internationalism, but along the way they forgot to talk us out of nationalism. The military operations that dismantled ...”

“... sparely clad prose: ‘Eamon Redmond stood at the window looking down at the river which was deep brown after days of rain.’ There are hundreds of sentences like this in The Heather Blazing, sentences in which simple elements are arranged simply. What Eamon Redmond did makes up most of the substance of the novel. But many of the verbs of doing with Eamon as ...”

“... the wrong side. True it was possible to get out of it by inching slowly forward, on one’s fat brown rump, to the foot; but that, for some reason, often woke both of them ... ’ Syed Omar, we find, is tight-wedged between his sleeping wives – ‘most irregular, uncleanly, contrary to the strict Islamic custom’. Strict Christian custom, likewise, is ...”

“... you will occasionally have seen people half-clothed in filthy rags, hair matted with the red-brown dust thrown up from the laterite earth, wandering the streets largely unmolested; talking, perhaps, to themselves; begging sometimes; or scratching through rubbish heaps looking for something to eat. When I was a child in Kumasi we were taught to fear these ...”

“... survived in office after ditching his mistress via text message – it’s hard to imagine Gordon Brown getting away with that. But now and again, one hears a keening strain from the old country. On the Alexanderinkatu recently a dress shop was enticing passers-by with ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, the D:Ream chantalong which Labour ran as its theme tune ...”

“... Jump blues groups of the 1940s such as Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown and Wynonie Harris performed on what was called the ‘chitlin’ circuit’, clubs and dance halls across the rural South and in the black districts of northern and southern cities. Few whites listened to the music, and it certainly wasn’t played on ...”

“... legal discrimination and guaranteeing the black right to vote, was the President who signed the Bill declaring King’s birthday a national holiday. There were two reasons for this historical irony. First, King was being celebrated as ‘poster boy’ (Dyson’s term) for the achievement of formal legal equality by those claiming that the struggle for ...”

“... was expecting – was that ten years would go by quite so fast. At the start of 2008, Gordon Brown was prime minister of the United Kingdom, George W. Bush was president of the United States, and only politics wonks had ever heard of the junior senator from Illinois; Nicolas Sarkozy was president of France, Hu Jintao was general secretary of the Chinese ...”