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“... change has made one of its periodic appearances in the headlines, with David Cameron and Gordon Brown each making announcements about what he will do when in office. This amounts to a green beauty contest, with the public in the position of the pen-sucking judges. Cameron first. The Tory leader has hitherto, for all practical purposes, said nothing about ...”

“... of flowers and busts of the Roman emperors, before climbing a wide and elaborate staircase to the Brown Room. Off to one side of the room there is a balcony, and daylight creeps in from the open doors. Three chandeliers hang from the ceiling. ‘The President’s hair is cool,’ says Tapan Das, aged 11. Tapan is the only one of the four not wearing a white ...”

“... grow a moustache and pretend you once had friends called ‘Tug’ Wilson, ‘Strangely’ Brown, ‘Spud’ Murphy and ‘Spider’ Webb. Lovely blokes, the lot of them. Diamond geezers. Never backwards at coming forwards. Credit to their ...”

“... into every face as they sat on a Number 30 from King’s Cross, and if the face happened to be brown, they looked to their bag or backpack. That is how fear and paranoia work: they create turbulence in your everyday passivity, and everyone was affected after the attempted bombings on 22 July in ways that won’t quickly go away. In the realm of ...”

“... dark gentleman ever to speak of it, but it bears a resemblance to that of Queen Victoria and John Brown, her favourite ghillie. Barbara Cartland, of course, could have made something of it. She was very pre-Oprah, and pre-Diana (her step-granddaughter), in believing it quite jolly for gels to be independent and bolters and all that, so long as they submitted ...”

“... and rethink the fridge, but I want it badly. It’s like a cyclist’s helmet made of conker-brown wood; or, maybe, like the Aquatics Centre, it represents the movement it will soon contain. There’s something Japanese about this sort of thing: the wave caught at the apex of its journey or the trees bent and frozen by the wind’s motion. The designer ...”

“... to compare with Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in an Convex Mirror’ and ‘Fantasia on “The Nut-Brown Maid” ’. The origin of ‘A Wave’ may be the passage about dreams in ‘Self-Portrait’: ‘They seemed strange because we couldn’t actually see them ... ’ As in ‘Self-Portrait’, Ashbery’s style is loose-limbed, musing, discursive unrhymed ...”

“... seemed to understand that stories have their own needs and immutable trajectories. Diana told Andrew Morton in Diana: Her True Story that she would never be queen. In 1992 I reviewed the Morton book for this paper and mocked her prediction: ‘The premonition is never quite explained. Does she think that death is beckoning, or divorce, or is she planning ...”

“... at my side. ‘Well, that were great,’ she says. ‘I’m Barbara. What’s your name?’ ‘Andrew,’ I say, ‘pleased to meet you.’ We chat for a minute. ‘Okay Andy. Where you staying? ... What? The Prince of Wales? ... Na, give me a ring later if you want to come and stop with us. You’d be welcome. My Nicola’s old room, it’s spare. No ...”

“... In January​ 2012 François Hollande, socialist candidate for the presidency, announced on the campaign trail that his ‘true’ enemy was finance capitalism. In the space of twenty years it had taken control of ‘the economy, society, our very own lives’. A few weeks later in London, where the British public had bailed out the City with mixed feelings, Hollande backed off ...”

“... underneath. Harrow has a system of compulsory recycling: green bins for paper, cans, bottles, and brown bins for organic waste, which includes garden waste and leftover food. People in Harrow who mix the stuff up, or ‘contaminate’, have their rubbish left uncollected, and must pay £20 to get it picked up, after they’ve sorted it; persistent offenders ...”

“... Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon ...”

“... women were bent with knives around a wicker basket, gutting fish from Lake Malawi, washing them in brown water. I guess there were about a hundred fish – there were 80 orphans – and a million flies. I asked the chief fishmongering lady how much the fish cost. ‘One thousand kwacha,’ she said. (About eight dollars.) ‘And what is it?’ ‘It is ...”

“... to Gordon Burn’s horribly fascinating books about Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West. Andrew Hankinson’s new book dramatises the last days of Raoul Moat, the Newcastle bouncer and bodybuilder who in July 2010 shot his former partner, Samantha Stobbart, her new boyfriend, Chris Brown, and a traffic ...”

“... Necropolis.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The sign could say: “Up here, something did happen to Andrew O’Hagan. Like each of us, he wondered if it would happen. And it did.”’ Something happened to my second ever schoolteacher, Mrs Wallace. We saw her totally somethinged in her coffin under a huge crucifix of Jesus Christ, to whom, by the look of the ...”