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“... Bengal to add to his palace menagerie, she reaches out to touch the animal through the bars of its cage. Isabella, her spoilt elder sister, who likes jewels and court fashions and doesn’t listen in class, dismisses it as a boring, sleepy pet. ‘Wake up! Come on, pussycat, come on!’Fashioning Lucrezia into marriage material means trying to contain her. The ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... to the glass panes of his bookcases, a symbolic gesture she saw as ‘trying to break out of his cage, escape to creation. But he never made it. He had lost his magic power over booze.’In 1932, Natalie Keaton, who had long since banished Keaton to another wing of the mansion, divorced her alcoholic husband. Keaton lost his wife, his home and his ...”

“... feeling like a budgie on display after it had successfully mounted the little ladders in its cage.’ His famous book was originally called The Abuses of Literacy. His publishers showed it to a libel lawyer, who advised them that it was extremely dangerous. To avoid the danger, Hoggart changed Abuses to Uses and removed his quotation from ‘the ...”

“... thinking, yet the move, it not divisive, Can’t help at this stage seeming indecisive. But John De Lorean shows more than strain In several parts of that uplifted face. The handcuffs induce shame on top of pain As in Los Angeles he falls from grace. Busted with many kilos of cocaine Packed nearly in a custom pig-skin case, He’s proved his gull-winged ...”

“... novels and six volumes of collected short stories, he is an industrious translator of the likes of John Irving, Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien and Scott Fitzgerald. Once the owner of a jazz bar who only had time to write in the small hours, he is now such a cult figure that there are even translations of his novels, complete with Japanese notes, aimed ...”

“... lotion and so on and on – iconic terrorist, iconic toaster, iconic Toby jug … They anticipate John Grindrod’s Weltanschauung. There is very little he sees that can’t have ‘iconic’ attached to it. As he wanders through the places created in the nearly five decades since Thatcher decreed the right to buy he finds the iconic everywhere. He sees it ...”

“... is not a conventional history. It is not, for example, meant to compete with the standard work, John Ramsden’s volumes in the history of the Conservative Party, or with other histories which carry the story forward to the present day. It is rather an essay, or series of essays, on themes and issues with which Ian Gilmour was and is himself involved ...”

“... and Westwood) ran on the King’s Road. There is fierce disagreement as to whether Westwood or John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten, thought up the title ‘Anarchy in the UK’ – he says it was him; she says it was her – but there is no doubt that she had a powerful influence on the way punks, including Lydon, dressed. She was the first to design T-shirts ...”

“... worse, statesmen around the world praise its role in Egypt’s ‘democratic transition’. When John Kerry visited Cairo last year he reported that Sisi had given him ‘a very strong sense of his commitment to human rights’. These issues, he said, were ‘very much’ on Sisi’s mind. For more than thirty years it was US policy to support autocratic ...”

“... by beauty and feels for animals. He talks to horses, reviles bear-baiting and is distressed by a cage of shrieking scabby parrots he sees unloaded at the docks. Only rarely does he resort to violence – though he is repeatedly jumped, punched, coshed, stabbed, shot at, half-drowned and drugged – and he is haunted by memories of his attendance at the ...”

“... Why is it,’ asks the mathematician John Allen Paulos in his book about the pitfalls of innumeracy, ‘that a lottery ticket with the numbers 2 13 17 20 29 36 is for most people far preferable to one with the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6?’ It is not an easy question to answer. All lotteries, after all, rely on a recognition by those who participate in them that the winning numbers are chosen at random, if only so that the participants can feel that their numbers have as good a chance of coming up as any others ...”

“... At all events, 24 pages of this self-imposed devoir were sent off each Tuesday to his friend John Johnston of Grange, a dullish youth of about Boswell’s own age, but one in whose affectionate and uncritical company he felt more at peace than with anyone. Fanny Burney, who commenced a journal at the age of 15, gave as her reason that ‘when the hour ...”

“... us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each deserves the ...”

“... period acknowledge their existence. When musicals start to include gay characters – with La Cage aux folles, say, and Rent – they become, according to Halperin’s argument (indebted here to D.A. Miller’s Place for Us), not more gay but less, since the genre derives its power from latent and not manifest content. These terms are not ...”