“... review, the Dial, Pagany. For scholars of the period she has long been something of a ‘man in a brown macintosh’, unmistakably present at the Modernist moment, yet oddly unidentifiable. These new editions and the biography should change that. Scarcely a month after the birth of her daughter in 1920, Butts became the lover of Cecil Maitland, an aspiring ...”

“... is the first person/I ever went to bed/with’ – over a teasing, ambiguous duo of brown arcs: breast and thigh? pear and leaf? a foreshortened phallus? In runny paint below the lower arc, the artists have added: ‘wow!’ O’Hara and his friends worked together not only on visual art but on poetic sequences, and on mock-critical documents ...”

“... In the first volume, on Imperial ‘origins’, there are ground-breaking contributions from Jane Ohlmeyer on Ireland and Scotland as ‘laboratories of Empire’, and from Peter Mancall on the troubled relationship between Europeans and Native Americans in the 16th and 17th centuries. The second volume, concerned principally with slavery and the ...”

“... arm than ‘the arm of an elm tree’. Yet Emerson’s acquaintances said the same of him. Jane Welsh Carlyle said he had no nature, just ‘a sort of theoretic geniality’. Her husband found him to be ‘elevated but without breadth, as a willow is, as a reed is’. When John Ruskin met him, he was sorry to find that he was ‘only a sort of cobweb ...”

“... spring afternoon and they have dressed for it in country formal outfits: stout boots, long, brown chequerboard coats with too many buttons, furry headwarmers that flap down over their ears. They look worried – like posh herdsmen who have lost their reindeer. At Shoreditch Church, they dress to the left and march west under the railway bridge. It’s ...”

“... at the end I had tears in my eyes.’ Among the Bloomsbury ‘items’ commissioned by Kenneth and Jane Clark was a grand Wedgwood dinner service created by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in 1935. The two artists chose to paint the 48 plates (out of 140 pieces) with a series of portraits of great women, including Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf ...”

“... home, I thought. ‘Estimate: $4000-6000.’ And further along a hand-knitted cardigan, ‘with a brown geometric pattern and matching knitted belt. Worn by Marilyn Monroe in 1962 and featured in a series of photographs by George Barris taken on the beach in Santa Monica, California. Estimate: $30,000-50,000.’ In the corner of the window there stood a ...”

“... American and noirish crime dramas like Kings Row – and attracting the attention of the actress Jane Wyman, whom he married in January 1940. When the war came, Warner Brothers kept Reagan out of uniform for as long as possible and arranged preferential treatment for him even after his deferments ran out. His noncombatant status provided new opportunities ...”

“... Girls. You daren’t skip-read for fear of being ticked off by Commander Dalgleish for misquoting Jane Austen. Despite (or because of) all this, Original Sin has been a notable success as far as that freakish segment of the population, the purchasers of hardback novels, is concerned. Dame Phyllis is back where she belongs, at the top of the charts, after a ...”

“... that we are reading an exact, first-hand account from this invisible man? Housman rose, placed a brown-covered small octavo pamphlet (of paged proofs?) upon the reading-desk and immediately began to read. He spoke slowly, with precision, in a pleasant, even, low, but clear and well-modulated voice, not raising his eyes, and frequently twitching the pamphlet ...”

“... in the Austenesque way (‘to be sensible of something’); refers to Pushkin being in ‘a brown study’ and suffering from ‘the ague’; and mentions that Pushkin and his boisterous mates one night ‘kicked up a terrible bobbery’. This is a big book, but it has a rakish, propulsive air, not unlike Pushkin’s glittering short novels and ...”

“... remain secret even with everybody looking at them.’ Her columns are vivid depictions of what Jane Jacobs called ‘the ballet of the city sidewalk’, but they also display a fascination with the forces that were making that life extinct. In ‘The Last Days of New York City’ (1955), she considers the ‘rumour’ that Robert Moses planned to run ‘an ...”

“... every footnote, stuffing the commentary with post-its, triple-underlining phrases like ‘his brown shoes’, only pausing occasionally to see the white fountain of remixed and continuous life that John Shade saw when his heart stopped. Nabokov sets up problems to which it seems there should be answers, but he does not give answers, he gives rewards. That ...”

“... Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve Arnold, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With Coward in the room this was perhaps foolhardy and ...”

“... and George Foreman, an extravagant pan-African festival where everyone from Miriam Makeba to James Brown came to perform at the football stadium in Kinshasa. Still, ‘it wasn’t all circuses,’ Van Reybrouck writes, ‘there was also bread.’ Mobutu achieved some of Lumumba’s principal goals, restoring Congo’s territorial unity and nationalising the ...”