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“... train, and opened the packet to discover a very old pale blue lady’s woolly, which he took to wearing in bed when he was ill.’ His childhood was blighted by parental neglect – a rapidly dawning consciousness of exclusion from Constant’s sophisticated world and a basic conviction of his own superfluousness. Photographs at all stages of his life show ...”

“... work he was doing as Minister of Housing, and the pleasure he took in drinking whisky and wearing red socks. There is also a lot of Party-speak, epitomised in ‘Joe Slovo: A Brilliant Teacher’ by the Chinese Shu Zhan or Harold Wolpe’s tribute to ‘the richness and innovativeness of his theoretical and strategic contributions’. Much of this ...”

“... Yet only a few years after the Beau’s creditors forced him into exile, the young dandies were wearing make-up, enormously high shirt collars, stiff lapels on their coats and corsets to produce wasp-waists, with padding on the chest, the rump and the calves. It was in response to these excesses of dandy fashion that Brummell’s doctrine was ...”

“... an undraped bed right next to him. In 1946 the old masters of the camera, on the other hand, were wearing wrinkled shirt-sleeves without neckwear, the skinny Stieglitz lolling and polishing his glasses, a white lock falling over his brow, his glittering gaze fixed beyond us; the plump Flaherty with his hands on spread knees and two fingers delicately ...”

“... they hear on the news. While they drive, the family listen to Kendrick Lamar, Laurie Anderson and David Bowie. The couple seem like cool parents who will raise charming and precocious children; their break-up just adds to their refusal to adhere to convention. One day, in a bookshop, the narrator finds herself staring at the photograph of a male author on a ...”

“... abuses, let alone the Rabaa massacre or the mass imprisonment and torture of dissidents. When David Cameron held a meeting with Sisi in New York in September he spoke of ‘Egypt’s pivotal role in the region’ and its importance to British policy. ‘Both economically and in the fight against Islamist extremism’, he said, Egypt was a crucial ally and ...”

“... realm of the airport showed up as an orange nimbus against the purple night sky. In the morning, David Cameron was holding an emergency press conference on the television stuck in the top left-hand corner of the breakfast room: ‘Work is at the heart of a responsible society,’ he politely hectored the assembled hacks, while we sloped off on our walking ...”

“... for themselves by taking outrageous risks. But the war reporters I knew best who died, such as David Blundy in El Salvador in 1989 and Marie Colvin in Syria in 2012, were highly experienced. Their only mistake was to go to dangerous places so frequently that there was a high chance that they would one day be hit by a bullet or a bomb. Messy guerrilla ...”

“... on Brunel’s Great Western Railway. Studies of Faraday’s experimental sophistication (by David Gooding) and his Sandemanian faith (by Geoffrey Cantor) have deepened, rather than challenged, our sense of his eminence. James’s work, meanwhile – in his own publications and his DNB entry on Faraday – has highlighted Faraday’s importance as a ...”

“... were scores of functions which by law only the lord chancellor could perform, and Lord Falconer, wearing a morning coat instead of the splendid black and gold robe, was sworn in as a nightwatchman lord chancellor. The joke went round Whitehall that the legislation enshrining the new dispensation was to consist of a single clause giving press releases from ...”

“... an epigraph from Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964). Awaiting his mistress, who will shortly reappear wearing little more than a ‘black lace underthing’, Moses H. reflects on ‘what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power . . . After the late failure of radical hopes.’ And ...”

“... Hobhouse recorded in his diary, ‘walked up the stairs.’ It was of course Caroline, wearing a page’s uniform. Fearing an elopement, which, Byron later assured him, would certainly have taken place but for his intervention, Hobhouse insisted that she left. Caroline refused and tried to stab herself, being restrained by Byron. Eventually, after ...”

“... women, they felt, looked more attractive covered up. However, some of the sisters who began wearing the hijab did not stop there: they put on dark flowing robes; then they covered their faces and began to wear gloves. They also wanted to play an equal role in the Islamic Society. One veiled woman insisted on remaining behind a screen during a meeting ...”

“... on the same day as Bishop Hooper, who had been led through London by night and taken to Gloucester wearing a hood so that his sympathisers could not recognise him. There he was burned in a slow, botched execution, ‘for the example and terror’ of the townsfolk, in the place where, according to the Catholic queen, he had done most harm. The burnings were a ...”

“... the lines of Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992). As a comic extravaganza it salutes David Lodge, whose character Morris Zapp gets a walk-on part. But for Binet, riffing knowingly on narrative theory isn’t an end in itself. As well as being a kind of allegory, and an elaborate joke, his conspiracy plot is a way of arranging non-fictional events ...”