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“... flesh. Clicking his tongue at Babel’s spectacles – ‘here you get hacked to pieces just for wearing glasses!’ – Savitsky introduces the new recruit to his colleagues: illiterate Cossack toughs, who greet the intellectual by throwing his suitcase into the street. At this point in the story the narrator transforms into the ferocious Lyutov. He stomps ...”

“... synonyms every week. It was with characteristic British reserve, though, that Lieutenant-Colonel David Morgan, Commandant of the 1st Battalion of the Seventh Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Riders, set about straightening things out. The Gurkhas are the British soldiers whom, in an ugly slur, Garcia Marquez accused of committing almost unprintable ...”

“... he teamed up with Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan to form The Goons: slightly wearing to listen to now (I suppose you had to be there at the time) but routinely credited with having ‘revolutionised British post-war comedy’ – unless that was Monty Python or Beyond the Fringe. He moved slowly but surely into film comedy, was ...”

“... and unfit houses’ in Manchester, 15,000 in Oldham, 5000 in Rochdale and 80,000 in Liverpool. David Kynaston cites these figures in his new book, On the Cusp: Days of ’62.* Reading them, I immediately wondered about the figure for Glasgow, and I found it in Michael Pacione’s history of the city. There were 97,000 houses in Glasgow awaiting demolition ...”

“... that he stood on top of the Vendôme Column in place of his uncle’s statue, he was struck, as David Baguley points out in Napoleon III and His Regime, not by the glory but by the loneliness. In Ham, he wrote a pamphlet on ‘L’Extinction du paupérisme’, explaining, in effect, how much better everything would be if he could just be allowed to get on ...”

“... is broken by a few tufts of wicker poking through where the armrest meets the seat. She is wearing a black wool jumper decorated with horizontal green stripes, and a black velvet skirt. The textures of the materials are astonishingly conveyed. The thorns on the stem of the rose that Kitty is holding up to her alarmed face are needle-sharp – you can ...”

“... and Rejected (1917) and Edith Haynes in Cicely Hamilton’s William – An Englishman (1919). The wearing of English tailor-made does not immediately identify these women as ‘mannish lesbians’; it does not, that is, invoke the classificatory schemes of the new sexology. Rather, it hesitates subtly between categories, at once provoking and obstructing ...”

“... would have taken over the role formerly played by degrees of reality, and philosophy would be wearing the clothes of anthropology instead of those of physics. But if philosophy is not science, why would this be a change for the better? Because, if Wittgenstein is right, philosophy would not be bogus anthropology. Its observations about our speech and ...”

“... per case.The city had become a place occupied only by manual workers. Every man apart from me was wearing a yellow or orange hi-vis jacket. I cycled past a building site at King’s Cross, an office development – by no one’s definition was this ‘necessary’. The contractors were Kier and BAM (one of my clients sued them when it was revealed in 2008-9 ...”

“... to fillet felines these days.’ Some of us followed Doom because we thought we were too cool for David Blaine. Doom’s tricks were breath control, intricate rhyme schemes, a beating heart beneath the cold veneer, of which he gave us only occasional glimpses. Now you see it, now you don’t.In his six solo studio albums, numerous collaborations and ...”

“... Heller’s novel is not deliberately anti-Jewish. It is meant to be an autobiography of King David, the sweet singer of Israel, as told by a wisecracking New Yorker who fancies himself as a Jewish wit. Cocteau once said of the French child poet, Minou Drouet: ‘All children are poets, except Minou.’ Something like that might be said of Joseph Heller ...”

“... We would like some examples of ‘the witty and highbrow artistic references’ which her friends, David and Jeremy, bandied about. But all we hear of Jeremy’s thoughts, when he and Rosie ‘tumble’ into bed, is that he thinks ‘fate had brought them together and they’d met in another lifetime.’ Jeremy is respectfully described as a ‘Cambridge ...”

“... the Black Prince winning his spurs and, by the end of the year, both John II of France and David II of Scotland safely locked up in the Tower of London awaiting ransom. Mission accomplished. Except it wasn’t. Sumption takes us on through the chevauchées – the large-scale mounted raids that the English used to weaken and demoralise the French in ...”

“... but ‘the recall of childhood from a distance – as though peering into a glass cabinet whilst wearing a sterilised mask and surgically scrubbed gloves’. He has chosen a life in lists. In this remarkable book, rich with evocations of an almost forgotten England, Meades makes himself a collector of his own past. Anyone who grew up in Britain between the ...”

“... and degraded specimens of his day. They would be surrounded by suitably deferential courtiers wearing gold pins in the shape of bamboo – ‘Milasi’ means ‘bamboo’. Mdala believed that the British would not buy his plan unless it was backed up by stacks of historical evidence proving the legitimacy of the Milasi and their age-old right to rule. In ...”