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“... of the Human Rights Act with a bill of rights and responsibilities entrenched against repeal. Gordon Brown advocates a new constitutional document ‘in parallel’, as the recent green paper puts it, with a bill of rights and duties. The Liberal Democrats advocate a convention-plus model. It’s worth considering first what the relationship of ...”

“... parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million working days were lost to strikes in 1979, mainly ...”

“... Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan) is little more than a propaganda outfit. The NHS? Crippled by Blair and Brown with their PFIs and privatisations and now well on its own way to privatisation thanks to the last Health Bill. The railway companies? Loathed by the bulk of their ‘customers’ they still receive state subsidies although the idea of renationalising them ...”

“... of the financial sector had left Britain overexposed – in his Keynesian response to the crisis, Gordon Brown had pulled the economy back from the brink of disaster, even into modest growth by the time of the 2010 election. Labour had still gone into that campaign arguing that spending reductions would be necessary (largely at the insistence of ...”

“... immediate contradiction and yet authoritative enough to set the tone for the other papers. ‘Mr Brown,’ a Telegraph story on 4 June began, ‘is considering removing Mr Darling from the Treasury and replacing him with Ed Balls, the schools secretary and his closest political adviser.’ You can’t argue with ‘considering’ – he might also be ...”

“... reshaping of the landscape and positioned the Conservatives to exploit it in the coming fight with Gordon Brown, New Labour’s heir in waiting. ‘Imagine a Tory leader promising that when his government came in there would be no special favours for those who contribute to Conservative Party funds; for employers, businessmen and the City; for big ...”

“... as proof of the Union’s benefit to Scotland – its chief architects, Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown, both of them Scottish, were also the most prominent leaders of the campaign against independence six years later. The role of Paterson’s Bank of England – and the currency it controls – is today the greatest single weakness in the case ...”

“... but receiving £2 billion up front helped Labour operate within the fiscal strictures set down by Gordon Brown in his ‘golden rules’: spending must be balanced by taxes over the economic cycle and the government should borrow only to invest. This immediate benefit of the loan sale was seen to outweigh future losses. Recently the coalition government ...”

“... and the UK expelled a few of each other’s diplomats. Their secret services stopped co-operating. Gordon Brown refused all meetings with Putin. In London, Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, was told by the Foreign Office to sit tight and wait while the UK tried to find a way to extradite the killers through back-channel negotiations. In 2010 she was still ...”

“... essential to know how, on his deathbed, Henry James’s head lolled unshaven to one side above a brown Jaeger blanket, or that Virginia Woolf’s corpse floated for three weeks in the, Ouse before it was carted off to be identified? In choosing to write ‘informal’ biography, David Arkell is relieved of the burden of having to record every fact in ...”

“... English) higher education. The provenance of their authors could hardly be more different. Roger Brown has been, successively, a senior civil servant, the chief executive of the Higher Education Quality Council, and vice-chancellor of Southampton Solent University; he is currently professor of higher education policy at Liverpool Hope University. Andrew ...”

“... by backward-yearning. Her forward-looking Dreams are located in the landscape of her past: flat brown earth stretching to remote horizons, fierce African heat that throbs slowly against the skin, scorched prickly bush, dust drying the nostrils. It was to this scene that she returned in her deadness in 1890, not to the colonial towns or lush valleys of the ...”

“... there was little sign of a strategy to deal with it. The same media, after all, made short work of Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. Whatever its shortcomings, for the vast majority of the electorate the media is where politics happens, and where political judgments are made; headlines, real and fake, circulate at light-speed through social media, detached ...”

“... holding a sign saying ‘Justice for Cammell Laird’. In 2008, the men had a meeting with Gordon Brown. About ten years ago there was talk of a film, but the money ran out. In 2014, the European Parliament called for the government to issue a formal apology. But the Tories paid no attention. The men now find themselves in a similar position to ...”

“... power in Whitehall during the six years of the first Wilson Government acquired a fund of George Brown stories. The fact that many were so preposterous as to be incredible did not mean that they were untrue. Even when they redounded to Brown’s credit, which they occasionally did, it was quite possible that they were ...”