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“... to keep his wife, Alexandrine, moderately happy. This is the stuff of biography and Frederick Brown trawls through it in considerable detail. In this 888-page Life, he does the same with almost everything that catches his attention. There is indeed not much one can say about the book, for the reason that it itself has so much to say. ...”

“... alter some colours in a painting (a red lake fading away, a copper resinate green turning brown), it is possible that the removal of a discoloured varnish will create a discordant effect which outweighs the advantages of returning some portions to their original condition. There is surely no one correct approach for conservators to take. There is one ...”

“... a number of little-known facts. For example, they say that on the afternoon of 1 May, Captain Christopher Wreford Brown DSO of Conqueror reported that he had sighted the General Belgrano and two escorting Exocet destroyers. The Government’s White Paper claims that Conqueror sighted Belgrano on 2 May. I know from ...”

“... by the ancient firm of Lord Frank Longford) and, finally, given the belief of Anthony Cave Brown that treason is a heritable trait, the Bell Curve theory of clubland skulduggery.Yet this is the standard, both of writing and editing and research. When James Jesus Angleton, crazed and criminal head of the CIA, suffered himself to be asked a few questions ...”

“... we could be thought to have got onto her radar. In February 1989 the shadow chancellor, Gordon Brown, reviewed a collection of essays entitled Thatcherism in a manner that suggested he did not expect her, or her philosophy, to last the pace: ‘When Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. Abroad, the term means ...”

“... design’, weren’t much help with admired and already outsized figures like Bellow and Christopher Hitchens. Whatever the explanation, writing novels ‘about real men and women’, as Bellow habitually did, now strikes Amis as ‘an extraordinary thing to go and do’. His solution is a book that looks a lot like his memoir Experience. There’s ...”

“... its very favourable treatment of Scotland bought the Union another couple of decades. Gordon Brown’s numbers show ecoomic problems looming for the UK in general – and the Scottish statistics are even worse. A European survey found in September 2001 that the UK had a long-term absent-through-sickness quotient of 7 per cent against 2.1 per cent in ...”

“... is the ‘Lake Taupo’. He has been assigned to guard it with his life. The stamp has a caramel brown frame, with ‘New Zealand’ at the top, ‘Postage Revenue’ and ‘4d Four Pence 4d’ at the bottom. In the centre is a circular vignette in blue depicting New Zealand’s central volcanic plateau, Lake Taupo and Mount Ruapehu, with two palm trees in ...”

“... behaviour often hovered dangerously close to being that of a paedophile,’ snorted Christopher Hart on the day Brian Gilbert’s movie Wilde was released). Julia Prewitt Brown sees him as a philosophical heavyweight; and celebrates his ‘dodginess’ in order to instal him in a post-dualist tradition of ...”

“... The walk-on part for Walter Pater palters; the attempt to placate the shade of Savonarola Brown is imprudent when it supposes that all you need to do is lay your finger alongside your nose and mention ‘the brilliance of a young poet called Oscar Wilde’, or mount an exchange like this:     ‘Has anyone ever come across this bearded scribbler ...”

“... man’ in the fall of 1999. And like the doomed protagonist, George, in the novel A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, I too was gay; I too was an English professor (on a one-term sabbatical back then); I too was middle-aged (at 39 years old then, whereas George is 58); I too was living in Los Angeles (although my teaching position is in Iowa City); I too ...”

“... rather dogged about some aspects of the Pre-Raphaelite work ethic. In April 1855, Ford Madox Brown wrote in his diary about the drawing for Work: ‘This is now to me a species of intoxication,’ he exclaims. ‘When I drew in the poor little vixen girl pulling her brother’s hair, I quite growled with delight.’ This entry is interesting because it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... norm for us. Then we found out what the modernists were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with Gilbert Sorrentino, exacting experimentalists who were ‘against order on the whole and against storytelling’. By setting much of his new novel at Brown in the early ...”

“... my expert opinion was Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy by Judith Brown, a social historian at Stanford University. The Times was particularly interested, the reporter explained, because another book about lesbian nuns in contemporary America had recently been published and was promptly banned from sale in Massachusetts. The ...”