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“... The Victorians revelled in it. Stephen Foster’s audience grieved for Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, the lost one ‘who comes not again’. The big Romantics all had their more portentous versions, from Lucy ceasing to be, to Shelley’s solipsistic sad heart, filled with grief ‘but with delight/No more, oh ...”

“... title suggests, they are prone to destructive acts. The protagonist of the opening story, ‘The Brown Coast’, is typical in that he has inflicted violence on his own life: after losing his job through incompetence, his inheritance due to rear-ending an attorney, and his wife by having an affair, Bob is in exile, doing odd jobs at his uncle’s beach ...”

“... and jollity, as well as the dazzling turns of phrase and the forensic psychology of the Father Brown stories. Chesterton adapted his detective’s talent for noticing the deceptiveness of the taken-for-granted in his defences of Christian belief in a secular world. Some people began to wonder if there were something saintly about him.After his death in ...”

“... their bodies. In Marie Coca and Her Daughter (1913), Valadon’s niece, Marie, sits in a plush brown armchair with her young daughter, Gilberte, at her feet. Gilberte, dressed for the occasion, stares straight ahead, stroking the head of her doll. Marie is glassy-eyed, withholding; Gilberte is matter-of-fact, resolute. Gilberte cups the doll’s head in ...”

“... anger of Henry James, when he discovered that the novel she had dedicated to him, Miss Brown, contained diminishing portraits of a large number of his acquaintances. William and Lucy Rossetti appeared as a stodgy reviewer with a shallow, garrulous wife obsessed by the charms of her children. William and Jane ...”

“... at the painting he’s just finished (‘two lines that cross in the middle’, one purple and one brown), with little to record except how tired he’s feeling or what he thinks of his annoying neighbour Åsleik, a farmer, who calls on him every day. ‘Mystical realism’ is Fosse’s name for the method, ‘the mysticism of ordinary life’, but the ...”

“... of the first half of this decade, writers as diverse in talent and sensibility as Rebecca Brown, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana and Sarah Schulman, writers whose main similarity seemed to be that they all started out at small presses before being ‘discovered’ by big houses.By now – by which I mean, in the most Nixonian sense of the ...”

“... had all been men who shielded her gallantly from any disrepute and in some cases – E.K. Brown, James Woodress – raised her to the rare air of perfection of her own fictional goddesses, heroines like Alexandra, Antonia and Thea. Her female friends idolised her and her male biographers romanticised her. Sharon O’Brien has given some facts a new ...”

“... passionate bonds: somewhere on the scene was always an Ellen, Annie, Charlotte, Ethel, Susan, Lucy. Most of these friendships began with what Minnie called the ‘My God, what a woman!’ stage, progressing from awe-struck enthusiasm to endless letter-writing, pet-names and hand-kissing. It’s doubtful they went much further, though it is clear that ...”

“... a story about an attendant at the National Museum in Addis Ababa who, when challenged that the Lucy – the first A. afarensesis australopithecine hominid to be discovered – was a plaster cast, had ushered him to a dusty back room and proudly opened a huge, unlocked box to reveal the real one. The explorer James Bruce came to Ethiopia in 1769 to look for ...”

“... the vicar; the vicar, the Reverend Nut, wants only the ghost of William Cowper to come into his brown study and read him The Task; the Sexton wants worms; worms want the vicar. Lambkins on those impossible hills, frolic, gambol and are sheepish under the all-seeing eye of Uncle Teapot, the Celestial Tinker ...’ In this parody (the Listener, 17 October ...”

“... a Soviet-era building the size of five football pitches. Meetings involved walking down miles of brown corridors, to a smoke-filled boardroom where a producer would quite comfortably say: ‘We need something to keep the nation pacified. The financial crisis has the Kremlin worried. Ideas?’ The other group was made up of the entertainment ...”

“... usually called ‘faith’ schools, and a new type of school, the city academy. Of the two, Gordon Brown’s government is clearly putting its money on the academies. The faith schools were a particular enthusiasm of Blair’s but are viewed with suspicion by the Labour Party as a whole. Their admirers believe they have an ‘ethos’ and an academic ...”

“... in a journal extract published in the Bristol magazine, Entropy. (Hannon describes how David Jay Brown and John Lilly in Mavericks of the Mind ‘discuss the notion that ketamine renders the brain directly susceptible to TV transmissions.’ And goes on that ‘Lilly even claims that he once found himself inside a TV soap opera while on ketamine, and was ...”

“... Victorian invention of the lobby correspondent, a role filled by men like William White or Henry Lucy, brought parliamentary debates alive for the newspaper reader. The correspondents usually did this by dwelling on the MPs’ individuality: their mannerisms, their dress, their hobby-horses. This humanised the institution and undermined radical stereotypes ...”