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“... the American way.’ ‘Right. And he doesn’t like the American way?’ ‘He hates it.’ Jack Levy, still sitting forward, braces his elbows on his desktop and his chin thoughtfully on his intertwined fingers. ‘And you, Mr Mulloy? You hate it?’ The boy shyly casts his eyes down again. ‘I of course do not hate all Americans. But the American ...”

“... bad taste Lubitsch was wrongly accused of. There are musical numbers, including ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ in Polish, a comic Hitler sequence borrowed from The Great Dictator, and great performances from Brooks himself, Anne Bancroft and José Ferrer. But the jokes are not about Nazis or about history. They are about the piety and melodrama we have wrapped ...”

“... in North Wales when a friend mentions a newspaper headline. ‘The headline was WHERE IS JACK RAYNER? It said that lots of money was missing as well. Is that your dad?’ Rayner thinks for a minute about how he might stick up for his father then says: ‘No ... That’s not my dad. Must be someone else.’ But in all fairness, the first lie was cast ...”

“... terrible friend.’ The epigram was coined by a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge called Jack Gallagher, You could adapt it to the present mood in Europe by saying: ‘Asylum seekers are a menace. Each one of us is someone’s menacing asylum seeker.’ It doesn’t even have to be a Gypsy; it could just be the retired couple fleeing from Guildford ...”

“... in 1982 and that summer got pregnant and got married, in that order, to the trade-union organiser Jack Dromey. Afterwards, when they were on holiday (‘we certainly never called it a “honeymoon”’), the sitting MP, Harry Lambourn, died. ‘There had never been a pregnant candidate in a general election before, let alone in the heightened atmosphere of a ...”

“... and Accusations’ included contributions concerning European history from Norman Cohn, Peter Brown, Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, all professional historians. They were fully integrated with the contributions of the anthropologists. Since that date it has become increasingly common both in this country and elsewhere for historians and social ...”

“... is the ‘Lake Taupo’. He has been assigned to guard it with his life. The stamp has a caramel brown frame, with ‘New Zealand’ at the top, ‘Postage Revenue’ and ‘4d Four Pence 4d’ at the bottom. In the centre is a circular vignette in blue depicting New Zealand’s central volcanic plateau, Lake Taupo and Mount Ruapehu, with two palm trees in ...”

“... is the titular character of Enola Holmes (on Netflix), directed by Harry Bradbeer and adapted by Jack Thorne from a novel by Nancy Springer. Springer has written more than fifty books for young adults, going some way towards confirming that this category often has nothing to do with the age of the reader, and means only that the writing is better than a lot ...”

“... Jack ‘did a Jack’ and missed our father’s funeral. He had taken his new girl to the Gargoyle Club the night before and had woken with such a monumental hangover that the train had left Paddington before he was out of bed. Explaining this to my mother on the telephone later in the day, he had boasted not only about the hangover but also about the new girl, who was just seventeen and had a marvellous figure – almost like a boy’s ...”

“... Man Who Would Be King’, which like all Kipling’s early tales made a great impression on Jack London. His own version, ‘An Odyssey of the North’, concerns an Aleutian Indian whose betrothed is stolen from him by a Norwegian seal poacher, a giant with a golden mane and the blood of the Vikings, much the same as the hero of Kipling’s story, and ...”

“... Kureishi, Farook Dhondy’s patronage at Channel 4, Praful Mohanti’s Through Brown Eyes). But in newspapers and non-fiction books ‘black’ Britons continue to emerge as one-dimensional categories which have to be worried about, feared or assisted – rioters, newsagents, voters, victims – rather than the rich collection of ...”

“... occasion, I tried 42 versions, but the final effect was too lapidary – you know what I mean, Jack? What the hell are you trying to extort – my trade secrets?’ As everyone knows, being a funny man is no laughing matter: our most popular clowns seem almost expected to have a savage, twisted underside to their natures. Perelman, who lived entirely off ...”

“... myself to do’. He also recorded another surprise: ‘we made Mingo, Sir W. Batten’s black, and Jack, Sir W. Penn’s, dance, and it was strange how the first did dance with a great deal of seeming skill.’ Mingo and Jack lived very close to Pepys. They worked for his colleagues, accompanied them everywhere, ran errands ...”

“... across stream, a green infanta hawthorn in a clearing; another dwarfed and crazy as a green Jack Frost, insect thin trees, lion mane one whose lower branches show hands sunlit from windows. As many shapes as among shifting clouds: fists and sparklers and fingers and fleurs de lys and candles and fans and umbrella spokes and florid gestures and ...”

“... angle of a leg, or the loop of a skipping rope add movement. English painters like John Bratby and Jack Smith were drawing on similar subjects with a not dissimilar, calculated clumsiness that trades crispness for directness, as though seeking to match the thing drawn in the accent of the drawing. ‘Catterline in Winter’, c.1963. Her seascapes and ...”