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“... The ‘Caucasian variety’, by which he meant Europeans, were ‘colour white, cheeks rosy; hair brown or chestnut-coloured; head subglobular; face oval, straight, its parts moderately defined, forehead smooth, nose narrow, slightly hooked, mouth small’. Like many of his scientific contemporaries (there were a dozen competing taxonomies in Blumenbach’s ...”

“... and William Roberts – and a revolutionary moment in British art. Even to express support for Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions was daring and radical. Nevinson, having seen a contemporary art show in Venice, knew he was ‘bored with the old Masters’. He was ambitious and keen to be liked, but socially difficult. A photo survives of a Slade ...”

“... A boyish 41-year-old, casually smart in a floppy double-breasted suit of indeterminate adman brown, he didn’t look like the devil at all and kept asking me if I minded when he stubbed his cigarettes out in my saucer. Of course I minded. But I wasn’t about to say so, not there, not then. For I was drunk at the time – on the heady alcohol of modern ...”

“... that a precarious balance must be kept. As the person walks (or sails, or climbs, or swims like Roger Deakin in the delightfully graphic and immediate Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain), mental notes will inevitably be scribbling themselves; the telling will be flawed if the impulse of the journey is merely to fulfil a book ...”

“... may secretly yearn to ascribe to them. Toasting the engagement of the BBC’s man in the region, Roger Hearing, with a bottle of champagne which, a proud best man, I had resourcefully procured one night, I swallowed hard as he told me of witnessing killings at Rwandan Government checkpoints in the first days of the crisis ‘There was no passion. It was like ...”

“... he would be tormented by ‘desire to copulate with a bronze bottom without copulating with a brown face’. Woolf, heterosexual (though he thought most women ‘extraordinarily ugly’ when naked), had a mild expatriate affair, and probably enjoyed work and play more than he lets on. He does mention specifically the delights of hard riding (‘it is ...”

“... to describe these as they might have appeared to a forward-looking monk who had been a disciple of Roger Bacon, and therefore believed in machines and science, and a friend of William of Ockham, and was therefore opposed to the multiplication of beings (and signs), sceptical of universals, a sort of proto-semiotician but also a common-sense ...”

“... the rain. Eagles would have come down and plucked out your eyes. Here,’ she said, thrusting a brown paper bag in my lap. ‘You’ll need these.’ The bag contained a box of sanitary towels and an explanatory pamphlet with diagrams, and that was the end of Melissa’s first lesson on menstruation and birth. As on so many occasions in her childhood, she ...”

“... of tea for breakfast: He stirred the milk in the mug, till, turning from clear but dark to pale brown and neutrally uniform, the water had become tea-like, the spoon negotiating the vortex it had set in motion by constantly evading, and sometimes colliding into, the submerged leviathan tea bag. Then he’d retrieved it from the pool on to his spoon, at once ...”

“... or herbal recipes. No one knows its author or origins, and no one can read it. The faded brown script is written in an unknown alphabet that has baffled historians, cryptographers and bibliophiles for nearly six centuries. When Umberto Eco visited Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which has housed the manuscript since the 1960s, it ...”

“... an immediate sterling crisis, and a crucial decision was taken in secret by Wilson, Callaghan and Brown not to devalue. The next three years of government were spent sacrificing growth, trade-union goodwill and just about everything else to prop up sterling. Even after the pound’s inevitable collapse, the Government didn’t really regain its balance. It ...”

“... and succulents, bamboo and yucca: the California green that can make you forget the California brown all around it’. Of all the book’s characters, Jo makes the most determined attempt to escape the pull of London, and it doesn’t last. Val, meanwhile, never thinks of leaving, and acts as a sort of den mother to a group of racist thugs, some of them ...”

“... again, appeared as a bartender in Thunder and Lightning (like Cockfighter, it was produced by Roger Corman), remarried once more and, in 1984, published Miami Blues, the first of the Hoke Moseley novels. He wrote three more over the next four years. He died in 1988. The Moseley novels can’t be called mystery novels in the traditional sense. For a ...”

“... agent sent down by a higher authority to save the world’. The name of the hero was to be Boreas Brown. Gray worked on this novel, off and on, for the next three decades, Boreas Brown turning into Obbly-Pobbly, Obbly-Pobbly into Gowan Cumbernauld. From Whitehill he went to Glasgow School of Art, then worked reluctantly as ...”

“... almost anything would do: an island, a plane, a train. G.K. Chesterton’s settings in his Father Brown stories are stranger and simpler: a beheading in a walled garden with no exits, the theft of all the silver of an elite dining club during a meal. He almost removes the need for motive: the perfect criminal commits the perfect crime for its beauty, for the ...”