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“... to fruition by Penguin and the fruits thereof foisted on a gullible public at £7.95 a time. Joseph Shipley’s The Origins of English Words is quite a different kettle of lexical fish: but ‘kettle’ is the word. Anything caught swimming in the Indo-European ocean has been thrown into the pot. The result is an etymological stew which defies ...”

“... which it would be difficult to beat. Take, for instance, his ‘peel me a grape,’ which cites Joseph T. Shipley as the source for the following information: ‘ ...first spoken by Mae West in her play Diamond Lil, which opened in New York on 9 April, 1928 ... Diamond Lil is a member of the demi-monde who affects the ...”

“... as a ‘flake’, or ‘Hufton’s Magnificent’. Hufton walked the ten miles from his cottage in Shipley in Derbyshire to Nottingham and back to show his flowers, carrying a dozen pots from his shoulders like a milkmaid’s yoke. But Willes is interested in every kind of ‘gardening practice’: how to grow asparagus by supporting the stems in bottles, or ...”

“... an anniversary marked that week with 17 co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad. May 2nd is the date of Joseph McCarthy’s death and J. Edgar Hoover’s. It is the date of Tony Blair’s 1997 election victory and the day in 1982 on which a British navy submarine torpedoed the General Belgrano. Soon after colleagues at Camp Abu Naji woke up to news of Anthony ...”