“... presence and status must on occasion have helped the legal processes forward.’ It’s a nice idea. But how, exactly, did this happen? Not surprisingly, Thompson finds the argument that Victoria was some sort of regal proto-feminist extremely difficult to sustain, and it is easy to see why a book originally commissioned for inclusion in the ‘Virago ...”

“... seems, for more or less any minor Axis celebrity who came to grief. And he was through with being nice to Churchill, that ‘sputtering tank of nicotine and/stale whiskey’. At the same time, he added a new opening to Canto 74, the first of the Pisan Cantos, expressing his sorrow at the death of Mussolini, who was executed in April 1945 while attempting to ...”

“... Murdoch’s descriptive prose: ‘A memory came back to her from her Italian journey, the young David of Donatello, casual, powerful, superbly naked, and charmingly immature.’ And no one could read more than a couple of her novels without recognising that they usually take place in summer, often in a large house, and rarely shift their gaze significantly ...”

“... begins to falter. For she did not, as might have been expected, use Smith as a gateway to a nice fresh-faced Yalie called, say, Charles (‘Chip’) Staunton Webster III, with a law opening in Daddy’s firm in Boston and a summer place in New Hampshire. Instead, she took up acting, still very much a déclassé occupation, and decided to go to ...”

“... old playroom in the basement, still dehumidified and carpeted and pine-panelled, still nice, was afflicted with the necrosis of clutter that sooner or later kills a living space: stereo boxes, geometric Styrofoam packing solids, outdated ski and beach gear in random drifts.’ Afflicted. That is what happens to rooms in the suburbia of contemporary ...”

“... daughters of people pleased to see them spending their days in a shirt and tie, or in a blouse and nice skirt – not in overalls, like they were. Most of those who came in – men who used to be cheerful and all right – would sink into the chair with a handful of notices from the board: much-handled notices offering security jobs to those with ‘experience ...”

“... and victim, a virgin forever being interfered with by corrupt and powerful old men, a dewy David battling the thug Goliath. And people, the people apparently, have loved it. They love him being rich, having his own island in the sun, shaming the suits at board meetings, tieless in jumpers knitted by his auntie, getting drunk and randy, blowing millions ...”

“... worried that she had been bullied into it. The speakers at their memorial included Hugh Casson and David Astor. ‘Why haven’t you thrown them away?’ I asked my friend Catherine Freeman, the 87-year-old owner of the dusty folder I’ve been drawing from. ‘They will help me as I plan my own service,’ she said. I wondered if the challenge of throwing ...”

“... on the dumps are self-employed sub-contractors who sell recyclable materials to the contractor. Nice technical language. The dump, when we reach it, fills the horizon, acres of it, fifty metres or so high, a mountainous smoking badlands with a sheer cliff-edge looming above the plain. It’s easy to see how something like that can slide. There is some ...”

“... Barrett, who died of cancer in 1961 – Barrett was nearly 16. (There was Roger Waters, too, and David Gilmour – who’d replace Barrett within moments, almost, of the band’s success. Both were Cambridge boys. Both, Willis tells us, had messed around with paint pots in a late-toddler phase in the same Saturday morning art club as Barrett at Homerton ...”

“... gestures into the music they write. There is an analogy to this situation, which the painter, David Hockney, was able to identify in an autobiographical anecdote. When Hockney was at art school and in the company of students busily mimicking the Abstract Expressionism that was new at the time, he found himself, with some unease, trying to accommodate ...”

“... after the Second World War.’ She gives much of the credit for this shift in taste to Elizabeth David, who in the 1950s preached that the fruits of the earth were more than mere adjuncts to flesh. Now the high price of meat is doing Mrs David’s work for her. The campaign has been waged mostly by women, over the dead ...”

“... quotes the half-drunken Leskov as having said: ‘Thee I anoint with oil, even as Samuel anointed David … You must write.’ Like so much else in Chekhov’s work, his relation to religion is ambiguous. In a letter to Diaghilev a year before his death, he wrote: ‘I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.’ But while ...”

“... about the brief moment of joy he felt when he saw the planes fly into the twin towers – ‘David beating Goliath’ – at which point ‘you’ (Liev Schreiber) turns firm and Bruce Willis-like and says: ‘and you wonder why your family is being threatened.’ Changez is seen giving a lecture at Lahore University and bellowing ‘We will wipe the ...”

“... school, perhaps because the man portrayed appears to be blind in one eye, as was Saladin.’ Nice try, but there is no evidence at all that Saladin was blind in one eye.) To return to the Maqamat miniature, al-Hariri and al-Wasiti were major figures in their respective fields. If the dust-jacket of a book about Western culture featured one of ...”