“... out of the most hideous of crimes) to the pleasure she was said to have taken in murdering Martin Brown and Brian Howe? Again: how could anyone know? Given the profit that these papers were making out of their horror at her profit (an obvious point), not to say out of the horror they drew their readers into – given, that is, their own traffic in the ...”

“... believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw their blackout curtains perhaps) and one ...”

“... One night his bedroom door opened and in she came: Wasting no time she dropped her short brown skirt. She never wore underpants. If this was her way of breaking the ice she’d gone clean through it. She made a dash for my bed but stopped cold when she saw there was someone in it with me – also a member of the cast, but from a more modest salary ...”

“... to offer their kind of political rationalism, being composed largely of stolidly unintellectual, brown-booted trade-union hacks. As the PLP itself became more varied after 1918, the paper’s attitude grew more nuanced, though it continued to lambast the emblematic representative of early labourism at its most mediocre and conservative, the former ...”

“... down pleaded with him to cancel it. The result was the virtual sack of the town hall by a Union Jack-waving mob of 30,000 jingoes armed with bricks, hammers, knives and bottles. For a while ‘the most unpopular man in England’, as passions receded he came to be seen as a man of principle – perhaps the oddest result of all. More to the point, his ...”

“... Dylan Thomas did the honours for Lynette Roberts and her groom in 1939, wearing a ‘smart brown suit’ he borrowed for the occasion. ‘I carried wild flowers and gave Dylan a bunchful of wild flowers for his lapel,’ Roberts recalled. ‘Vernon Watkins’s trousers were draped around his shoes.’ Thomas had promised to return the suit ...”

“... Hornung looks back, not forward. His last substantial novel, Fathers of Men, has resonances of Tom Brown’s School Days, published half a century earlier. Thomas Hughes immortalised Dr Arnold’s Rugby; Hornung does the same for Thring’s Uppingham. Compare the Squire’s memorable meditation before sending Tom off to boarding school: ‘What is he sent to ...”

“... create a climate of excitement which finds Johnny Depp paying $ 15,000 for what purports to be Jack Kerouac’s old raincoat. The vendor cursed himself for letting the relic go so cheap: a soiled handkerchief was subsequently found in the pocket which could have been sold separately, or used to bump up the price tag by another couple of grand. We are all ...”

“... raped, resulting in a child she gave up for adoption. Later she was raped again, by James Willmott-Brown, a slick entrepreneur who had given her a job at his wine bar, and who will return decades later to stalk her. The scene in which she confronts him has become legendary – not just because she grabs him by the balls, and threatens to serve them up to him ...”

“... like the custard bun Obbe was talking about. More like the slug Obbe once cut open behind the boot-jack with his penknife, that slime came out of.’ In this context the real surprise would be anyone having something nice to say about the body. Jas covers Hanna’s eyes to make sure she doesn’t peek at her own objectification. Obbe shakes a Coke can ...”

“... a ‘folio Beaumont and Fletcher’ – an acquisition that he had saved up for by wearing his brown suit until it was threadbare. Both scared and enraptured, Elia had dithered until 10 p.m. on a Saturday before finally setting out to walk from Islington to the bookseller’s premises in Covent Garden. When he returned home, he insisted on collating and ...”

“... wartime inflation. In the winter of 1946-7, Goodman, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Les Brown, Harry James, Jack Teagarden and Benny Carter dissolved their bands. The big band was never to recover. Even the ‘sweet’ bands, traditional rivals to swing, suffered from a decline in public dancing. There is no ...”

“... readiness to kill to achieve these ends. The coloured races, the ‘swarms of black and brown’, were unlikely to meet the ‘new needs of efficiency’, he argued, and he equivocated embarrassingly about the Jews. The eventual disappearance of separate races would be the outcome of a gradual process of assimilation and attrition. This has not ...”

“... writing too freely to a publisher. Launched in 1909 the firm began with a general list, of which Jack London was a mainstay. Briefly on the strength were P.G. Wodehouse and Hugh Walpole. Gerald Mills was an intellectual who put up most of the money; it is his fate to become universally and perhaps immortally identified with a branch of literature which was ...”

“... Sir Oliver Lodge photographed fairies), Aunt would be close at hand, in helmet-hat and nigger-brown costume, to make sure Michael did not fall down a rabbit-hole, while Aunt, muttering Yorkshire gibberish, searched for magical comfrey. Later, as an Army officer lost in the Sind Desert, Michael Wharton sat alone on a stony hillside, waiting for Aunt to ...”