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“... removing the structure of the suit to create a soft, sloping fit, as modelled by Richard Gere in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980) – a look much emulated in the City and on Wall Street. Fashion, Breward emphasises, is always provocative, endlessly recycling the aesthetic challenges of the fringe into mainstream culture. ...”

“... in the British secret service was to denounce Kim Philby in time for the spy to run to Moscow; and Paul Spicer, Rowland’s devoted bagman, who is well known to every journalist who ever asked a question about Lonrho and had it suavely deflected. But Tiny’s greatest catch was perhaps his second chairman. He was looking for someone who might fit in with his ...”

“... for eradicating poverty is the redistribution of income and wealth from rich to poor.’ Paul Routledge patronises the young Brown: ‘As a panacea for all social ills this vision could hardly be faulted. As a political strategy it was lamentably deficient.’ Similarly, Gordon Brown now dismisses the policies set out in Red Paper and The Great ...”

“... and story. But it is more than that. It is what the images and the story are not quite saying. Paul Julian Smith, in a subtle essay accompanying the Criterion Collection DVD of the film, reminds us that it was shot as Franco was dying, and that the Spanish people then ‘looked back in fear and forward with ...”

“... sixth floor of a Jeddah apartment block in May 1979. There were no other women, except for Helen Smith, a 23-year-old nurse from Yorkshire who worked in the same private hospital as Richard Arnot, a surgeon. What actually occurred at the party is still the subject of dispute, and is related to a pending legal action. But everyone knows what happened ...”

“... Die Zwitscher-Maschine is the title of a picture by Paul Klee, and a most beguiling picture it is: beaky, joky, reticular line-drawing on washes of demurest blue and rose, a sort of grave man’s Rowland Emmett. It makes a pleasant cover illustration for Neil Smith’s collection of propaedeutic papers on linguistics, providing a title for the book and a humorous gloss on the text, the first in a series of playful images and allusions deftly exploited by Professor Smith as he attempts to introduce his readers – defined as ‘outsiders’ and ‘beginning insiders’ – to the intricate delights and perplexities of his subject ...”

“... of Christmas from the Cuban calendar. But in Havana, I heard the extraordinary story of what John Paul II said to Fidel Castro during his audience at the Vatican late last year. The Holy Father, standing close to the President, took the opportunity to ask him why he had cancelled Christmas. The direct approach does not necessarily guarantee a satisfactory ...”

“... bookshop reading is, of course, the chance to see and hear David Starkey cheek by jowl with Zadie Smith, Roy Strong, Terry Jones, Michael Holroyd and all the other writers showcasing their various talents this year. Such events certainly seem to be increasing rapidly in number and variety. Cheltenham and Hay-on-Wye (Tony Benn: ‘In my mind, it has replaced ...”

“... and are thought to override explanations from inside a religious point of view. Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s book defends a contrasting, pluralistic conception, according to which multiple different forms of understanding of religion – as of other human phenomena – are all legitimate, and compatible with one another. This ecumenical conclusion is ...”

“... dialogue; or as Weight puts it in the first subheading of his introduction: ‘Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker’. Which is a nice phrase, even if it’s half-inched from an interviewee in a previous book, Jonathon Green’s flawless oral history of 1960s counterculture, Days in the Life. (In fact Green also used it as a subheading. This ...”

“... to which the words can be attached. In The Promise of Artificial Intelligence, Brian Cantwell Smith tried to explain this by comparing a map of the islands in Georgian Bay in Ontario with an aerial photograph showing the islands along with the underwater topography. On the map, the islands are clearly delineated; in the photograph it’s much harder to ...”

“... allusions. Bulwer-Lytton himself had inaugurated the fashion for this brand of crime fiction with Paul Clifford (1830), and restrained the tendency to verbosity and false pathos that marks his other fiction. He believed, he wrote in an essay of 1838, that in the portraiture of evil and criminal characters lies the widest scope for an author profoundly versed ...”

“... arrest by the ICC in Kigali in 2013. No voices in Africa could be heard protesting that Paul Kagame’s regime had used Ntaganda for more than a decade as a privateer and, according to UN investigations, had covered 80 per cent of Rwanda’s defence budget in the first few years of power by extracting hundreds of millions of dollars from illegal ...”

“... and Price Waterhouse. Over Atlantic Computers, Price Waterhouse sued Touche Ross. Over Wallace Smith, KPMG sued Coopers and Lybrand. Over London United Investments, Price Waterhouse sued KPMG. Over Polly Peck, Touche Ross sued Coopers and Lybrand. Poor Coopers and Lybrand was in the soup more than once over its not altogether distinguished accountancy of ...”

“... Coolidge is a hero in Paul Johnson’s eyes, and Franklin Roosevelt a villain. The former is quoted with approval: business ‘has for its main reliance truth and faith and justice. In its larger sense it is one of the greatest contributing forces to the moral and spiritual advancement of the race.’ About Roosevelt Mr Johnson writes: ‘In terms of political show-business he had few equals and he had an enviable knack of turning problems into solutions ...”