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“... sailed forty miles down the Thames to Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey in a boat made from brown paper. He fashioned oars from dried fishes tied to sticks, and strapped inflated animal bladders to the sides of the boat to help it float. Taylor was not a shy man. His list of expansive jests included, in 1618, a walk to Scotland with no money, a parody ...”

“... means to escape poverty. Hopeless rage smoulders throughout these communications. In 1797, William Brown of Benton, Northumberland was sent a menacing letter from somebody claiming to be a former servant, ‘turned away for no reason’, asking that £20 be left under a stone in Tynemouth: ‘me famalry are now starving the Butchers will let them have no more ...”

“... a ‘folio Beaumont and Fletcher’ – an acquisition that he had saved up for by wearing his brown suit until it was threadbare. Both scared and enraptured, Elia had dithered until 10 p.m. on a Saturday before finally setting out to walk from Islington to the bookseller’s premises in Covent Garden. When he returned home, he insisted on collating and ...”

“... a documentary that accused him, inter alia, of being responsible for the poisoning of his friend Alexander Litvinenko, planning to murder the mayor of Moscow, organising the kidnapping of a Duma deputy and funding Chechen terror attacks. After his death I expected more vitriol. Instead the reaction was stunned, mournful. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry ...”

“... The​ judiciary, Alexander Hamilton wrote in ‘Federalist No. 78’, was ‘beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power’. Today, in the United States, that is open to question. All it takes to nullify the decisions of the president or the legislature is the decision of five members of the Supreme Court – and there is often no practical way to reverse the court’s rulings ...”

“... folded photograph; it shows his grandfather, in younger days, standing next to a beautiful, brown-haired woman. On the back of the photo there is a message written in Yiddish: ‘This is me with Augustine, 21 February 1943.’ The woman helped his grandfather escape a Nazi round-up; with the photograph in hand – by turns a lucky charm, potent symbol ...”

“... 1824, when he gained his freedom from Count Sheremetev, the man who owned him. Forty years before Alexander II freed the mass of Russia’s serfs, this felt like a miracle. ‘I will not describe the emotions I experienced in those first minutes of profound, stunning joy,’ Nikitenko writes. ‘I can only say Glory to the Almighty and proclaim my eternal ...”

“... that dotted the House and Senate floors. Frequently, they missed, giving the carpets a dark brown hue. The most renowned political figures didn’t take part in violent confrontations, though Clay was a master of verbal threats and insults. He called one colleague ‘a tottering old man’, and when the object of his abuse complained, Clay dared him to ...”

“... on the Soviet Union’.* In 2009 the Ministry of Defence commissioned Lieutenant General Chris Brown to carry out a review of British strategy, later released under the Freedom of Information Act as the ‘Operation Telic Lessons Compendium’. Brown concluded that the army hadn’t been prepared for the occupation, and ...”

“... market – was playful rather than integral to his message. The co-architect of New Labour, Gordon Brown, went a few steps further, attempting to rehabilitate Smith, not without some plausibility, as a proponent of ‘the helping hand’. In part this manoeuvre was prompted by local piety, for Brown was brought up and has ...”

“... hair; bright-laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate, of sallow-brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy; – smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical-metallic, – fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous: I do ...”

“... in this apparently insignificant end of empire, to varied and sometimes unexpected effect. George Brown, briefly Foreign Secretary in the 1966 Labour Government, thought British sovereignty should be tidily ceded to the eager Argentinians. Michael Stewart, his successor, was more cagey. But he did draft a concessionary agreement, only to be driven by the ...”

“... success with her caftans.’ Shoes remain a problem. Marching down a Paris boulevard in 1968 with Alexander Cockburn, the compañero of her political phase, her feet are killing her. They stop off to get new footware, but ‘the trouble is I want smart shoes – we are still in a banlieue. I select in the end a pair of ...”

“... of the boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, but it remains a memorable dish, floating with its brown meats and its yellow meats at the solar plexus of the novel, emblem of Mrs Ramsay’s martyrdom on the family altar, but also of her detachment, for it is not she but the cook who has taken two days to prepare it in the kitchen. Hazlitt remarks in an essay ...”

“... now?’The undertakers zipped him into a mauve body bag and took him away. A few days later, Alexander, my older brother, went to the funeral home – all these homes, this last being the least homely – to choose a coffin. He reported that Daddy had been installed in a garage which, it had been stressed, was modified to mortuary standards. We bundled ...”