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“... the Swedish government decided to sell the plant to a consortium of Czech businessmen intent on a brown coal renaissance. Malm was himself a participant in the Ende Gelände action. The CEO of Vattenfall, whose brown coal sites in Germany produced CO2 equivalent to Sweden’s annual emissions plus a third, called it an act ...”

“... da Vinci. There is a sticker inside saying ‘Used by permission of Corbis Corporation and Bill Gates’, to whom I suppose Leonardo, or his signature at least, now belongs. Note the number of retired couples among the visitors, retirement more obvious in the British and the Americans than with the French, say (and where the Italians are ...”

“... cover his own basic dullness. He remembered the visits Wilde made to his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown: Mr Wilde was a quiet individual who came every Saturday, for years, to tea … Wilde would sit in a high-backed armchair, stretching out one hand a little towards the blaze of the wood fire on the hearth and talking of the dullest possible things to Ford ...”

“... Miliband, to commit to a milder form of austerity. Its whipped abstention on the Tories’ welfare bill shortly after its election defeat was emblematic of its lost bearings. In a field of leadership candidates remarkable only for its lack of distinction, Corbyn’s candidacy reminded the party what it had been missing: socialist principle. Since Corbyn’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of reproach and supermarkets are running out of Argentinian beef. The Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, is accused of doing too much and doing too little. The questions surrounding the foot and mouth epidemic – where will it all end? how did it all start? – might be understood to accord with anxiety about every aspect of British agriculture today. The ...”

“... ages and orientations. ‘To a young undergraduate,’ the former Labour minister and SDP leader Bill Rodgers recalls, ‘his reputation for having fought with the 1st Airborne Division and for entertaining girls who left his college rooms at dawn was an irresistible combination.’ Lurching between intense concentration and reckless frivolity, he was the ...”

“... the use of superphosphates, generously subsidised, seemed a magical way of turning the great brown country green; whenever anyone looked for a mineral they found it; vast schemes were begun designed to turn Australia into the rice bowl of South-East Asia; Australia’s own people’s car, the Holden (virtually General Motors), poured off the assembly ...”

“... selling them armoured vehicles at an inflated price. McChrystal was also invited by General Doug Brown, as the head of Special Operations Command his boss between 2003 and 2007, to join the board of a Virginia-based company called Knowledge International. KI’s uninformative website doesn’t mention that it’s the US arm of a UAE-based firm set up by a ...”

“... this aroused soon caused her hands, apparently joined behind her lover’s back, to become a small brown paper parcel under the arm of a stout engine-driver who leaned, probably drunk, against the baskets, his cap so far forward as almost to conceal his face. I could not banish the thought that what I had first seen was in fact his own androgynous fantasy, the ...”

“... This isn’t as far-fetched as it seems. ‘Do you know,’ he wrote to his old schoolfriend Bill Townend in April 1939, ‘a feeling is gradually stealing over me that the world has never been farther from a war than it is at present . . . No war in our lifetime is my feeling.’ He was not alone in this lack of prescience, but few of his fellow ...”

“... particularly interesting species of the genus’. Burghley’s son Robert Cecil seems to fit the bill rather better. Yet even he, inhabiting, as his biographer Pauline Croft notes, ‘the grey world of administration’, was a different species from Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, or even George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; and the title of her essay puts ...”

“... the guards had to be called from St James’s to restore order and the night ended with a £100 bill for damages and a great deal of heated comment in the papers. According to one of the supper party, Charles Sackville, Earl of Middlesex, who sent an excited account of the events to his friend Joseph ‘Spanco’ Spence in Oxford, ‘it has been the talk of ...”

“... and a shiny new penny.’ Despite living for many years in London and New York (and marrying Tina Brown), Evans has retained an agreeable touch of puzzled or even prudish innocence: ‘the effing and blinding that is the vernacular today’ was unknown in his family. Perhaps he doesn’t realise just how interesting he is in this respect. He comes from a ...”

“... of Macaulay’s lacerating review) began political life by passionately opposing the Great Reform Bill in the Oxford Union. The man who in old age was to be both revered and mocked as the People’s William started out with the firm conviction that ‘the majority will be in the wrong.’ And the startling steps by which he found himself among the Liberals ...”