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“... One morning​ , Hazel Brown wakes up in a hotel room in Vancouver to discover that she is the author of Baudelaire’s complete works. This is the beginning of Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal, which is billed as a novel, but reads more like a combined Bildungsroman, ars poetica and series of essays on clothing, painting, gender and reading ...”

“... not?) with men. He wasn’t the first to climb the ladder from prostitute to superstar. As Alexander Walker, quoted by Leider, observes: ‘There is a parallel here with Greta Garbo’s early experience as a lather-girl in a back-street barber’s in Stockholm. She, too, would cash in later on her early training in the arts of servicing and beguiling ...”

“... the encyclopedia is a chapter on the heroism of translators. Elias Muhanna, now a professor at Brown, first encountered Ultimate Ambition as a student, when he was assigned to translate a hundred pages from an especially forbidding chapter on legal contracts, which included the language to use when agreeing to rent out your son. He set aside a year to read ...”

“... of the few occasions when we seem to hear her voice, she describes feeling ‘as if very coarse brown Paper was tearing from within her’.The crudest, funniest and most effective of the many Toft satires, the anonymous Much Ado about Nothing: or, The Rabbit-Woman’s Confession, ridiculed her illiteracy and promiscuity in an exposé ‘in her own Stile and ...”

“... you weren’t ruthless enough.’ When Eden offered him the Exchequer, Macmillan did a Gordon Brown: insisting that ‘as chancellor, I must be undisputed head of the home front, under you’ and that there could be no question of his predecessor, Butler, being accorded the title of deputy prime minister. Barely a year later, after the Suez debacle, he ...”

“... University of Sussex in 1986. But she would like us, she said, to see Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander if we could, and to read ‘The Immortal Story’ by Isak Dinesen, ‘whom I have since discovered has become rather trrrendy’ (a film had just been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert ...”

“... the overall jacket colour: green for France, red for Russia, olive-green for Germany, purple and brown for the Classical world, and so on. The book was too subtle for me, of course, and I failed to find it at all erotic. I doubt I understood the scene in the closed cab, let alone the metonymic burst of white paper shooting from the window at its shrouded ...”

“... and brought his four sons up in the same faith, though he was, and remains, an atheist. My brother Alexander and I were brought up as Catholics, presumably a non-negotiable decision given that my mother came from an English Catholic family who have never been anything else in a thousand years of continual occupation of the same house. I don’t have any ...”

“... Garbo fell for each other. Such was the intensity of their love scenes that the director, Clarence Brown, felt it would be an intrusion to yell ‘cut!’ Instead, he would call the crew over to another part of the set and ‘let them finish what they were doing’. Garbo moved into Gilbert’s house. The publicity department couldn’t believe its luck. Garbo ...”

“... you entered the frontier controls: Chinese cigarettes, the fumes of two-stroke cars, the smoke of brown coal briquettes, the whiff of the state disinfectant, Wofasept. Not unpleasant: almost a cosy fug. It didn’t need the portrait of Walter Ulbricht, the general secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), to tell you where you were. Now the smell has ...”

“... readiness to kill to achieve these ends. The coloured races, the ‘swarms of black and brown’, were unlikely to meet the ‘new needs of efficiency’, he argued, and he equivocated embarrassingly about the Jews. The eventual disappearance of separate races would be the outcome of a gradual process of assimilation and attrition. This has not ...”

“... had just handed in their passports at the window. ‘Biletov nyet,’ a voice barked from behind a brown computer console labelled ‘Robotron’. The rest happened quickly. I saw my father pick up my passport and – perhaps hoping I wouldn’t notice – silently insert a $20 note before instructing me to go up to the counter and ask the lady to check ...”

“... thought to exercise ‘a softening and civilising influence’ on male manners. William Alexander argued in his History of Women (1779) that the rank … and condition in which we find women in any country mark out to us with the greatest precision the exact point in the scale of civil society to which the people of such country have arrived; and ...”

“... in the grip of the Cult of Mackintosh, exposing endless reels of film as they gazed at the dark brown sandstone of the Renfrew Street front, really made of the building. Glasgow may be on the pilgrimage route along with Barcelona, Budapest, Nancy, Moscow and Riga, those cities in which strikingly original buildings from the years around 1900 can be ...”

“... became more formal and more centralised. First the bishops became involved, acting, as Peter Brown puts it in his brilliant study The Cult of the Saints, as ‘spiritual impresarios’. Then it was the turn of the Popes, such as Urban II in the 11th century, Calixtus II in the 12th and Gregory IX in the 13th. As Professor Barlow reminds us in an essay ...”