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“... it is not quite abstract and passionless. Readers who doubt that lexicography has a human face – wearing at times a crooked grin – might try reading W.S. Ramson’s essay (‘G’day,’ it says) on the Australian National Dictionary, where they will learn much concerning diggers, cobbers, mateship, bludgers and larrikins and jackeroos, the bush and the ...”

“... If the publishers thought they were going to get the kind of sputtering firework that one of David Frost’s script associates might help him deliver into a tape-recorder, they haven’t. This is a book meant to be read and even kept. Indeed it might have more keepers than readers, since a probable majority of buyers will be the people mentioned in the ...”

“... as if they’d just been done with Persil in a boil wash. One of those long summer days, my friend David and I got caught after stealing powdered floor cleaner from the local supermarket and pouring a huge mound of it in a doorway. The manager went in search of our mothers and made them pay for our strange artwork. They brought buckets, ...”

“... in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat as soon as I saw that it contained a chapter dedicated to the history of the AA ...”

“... Modern​ Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements ...”

“... had infiltrated the Sangatte camp. A year later, with the agreement of the then home secretary, David Blunkett, and his French equivalent, Nicolas Sarkozy, the camp was closed. Blunkett called the Sangatte site ‘a festering sore in Anglo-French relations’. Sarkozy spun its closure as an act of goodwill towards migrants: ‘We have put an end to a ...”

“... his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be manifestations of his nationality. He ...”

“... of Thorpe’s tour of South-West England’s beaches in a hovercraft, from whose running board, wearing a trilby and a three-piece suit, he would address the trunked and bikinied masses. ‘Britannia Roused, or the Coalition Monsters Destroyed’ by Thomas Rowlandson (1784). In the election of October 1974, Wilson got a bare majority, with 319 ...”

“... The back gallery, intended for visitors, was mostly taken up by the press. Dickens remembered wearing out his knees ‘by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery of the old House of Commons’. Women visitors (a maximum of 14) were banished to the attic, which had a small circular opening in the floor. They could hear voices from below, but ...”

“... back in 1959 and first published in 1980. A comparison between the two books, Vasily’s and David’s, does not do the later one much good. As an outpouring of feeling, and as a series of sombre representations of the condition of modern Israel, To the End of the Land is often impressive, sometimes touching. As a novel it simply does not come off. This ...”

“... and an eagerly embraced opportunity for the people who’ve written books on the phenomenon. Like David Kalat’s A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series (1997) and Steve Ryfle’s feebly named Japan’s Favourite Mon-Star (1998), William Tsutsui’s Godzilla on My Mind profits from the haziness of most people’s recollections by ...”

“... altered and three were quashed. It’s easy to see why so many of these cases go to appeal. But as David Ormerod, the law commissioner, said to the Justice Select Committee, the outcome of these appeals – like those of the original trials – ‘are often perceived as illogical or unfair’. In May 2010 two South London gangs, Shanks and Guns and the ...”

“... standing. In the case of Elspeth Howe there were muttered suspicions that she would be the one wearing the trousers. The Conservative Parliamentary Party in its default gentleman’s club mode likes nothing more than chuntering on about the perils of a Lady Macbeth. (Elspeth Howe waited 15 years to extract her revenge, helping her husband write the ...”

“... the end is a return: ‘The crease is still sharp in the trousers.’ The clothes are ready for wearing on Sunday, and this is what they will look like when the man who wears them has gone. The after-feeling is the surer for being subdued. And this goes with the emphasis of Agee’s title, from a passage of Ecclesiasticus, an apocryphal witness of sacred ...”

“... award. That took her to New York in 1956. It was the first time she had been there, and she was wearing ‘a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal’. She was poor, without feeling it, and I’d guess she lived very simply. ‘I had the feeling that if I needed money I ...”