“... Valley, East London would be unendurable. Victoria Park, the Lea, the Thames: tame country, old brown gods. They preserve our sanity. The Lea is nicely arranged – walk as far as you like then travel back to Liverpool Street from any one of the rural halts that mark your journey. Railway shadowing river, a fantasy conjunction; together they define an ...”

“... figure. During this long opening section, the Confederate guerrillas William Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson and even Archie Clement, James’s companion during the Civil War, overshadow him. Still, the account is often smart and engaging. In the 1850s and 1860s, western Missouri and eastern Kansas produced Border Ruffians, Jayhawkers, guerrillas and John ...”

“... has some ten thousand members. However, as James Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University, reassures us, his colleagues in the discipline have themselves a very defective grasp of American political culture. In particular, Morone believes that political scientists are in thrall to the misguided notion that the classical liberalism ...”

“... contribution (as economists would say) to the novel is the short speech she delivers: – Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it’s seven mornings a pint at twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling and one and two is two and two, sir. The logic of accountancy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”