“... money will always elude whoever wants it most. A high, thin bottleneck sound rises up in ‘Cannon Ball Blues’, as if to escape the resignation of the song – and then as if it isn’t worth the effort. The back-and-forth tug of war on the piano in ‘Lo and Behold!’ is close to what Hutchison’s music is about: a tired, so-what refusal to wait around ...”

“... on Burra is that he took his cue from Continental graphic artists: Caran d’Ache, for one, and George Grosz obviously. But even when he was producing the sort of stuff now classified by the dealers as Art Deco, his traits, ghoulish yet lyrical in tone and atmosphere, evoke de la Mare. A screech across the sands! That sullen Thump! Oh, wicked Mr Punch ...”

“... had a bad reaction to the silver make-up and nearly died, and that the film was transformed by George Cukor, who came on set for a week after Richard Thorpe, the original director, was fired and before Victor Fleming took over. Cukor changed the bricks of the Yellow Brick Road from oval to rectangular and gave the Wicked Witch a bun to make her look ...”

“... examination shows it to be more sinister: it is seemingly the house magazine of the Society of St George and dedicated to the preservation of the English identity. A second number comes today, more virulent than the last with columns of correspondence all fervently opposed to the European connection, denouncing Labour (and half the Conservatives) as ...”

“... as ‘largely chivalry’ on their part: ‘I didn’t have time for work of my own,’ she told George Saintsbury, the English man of letters who’d been one of her contributors. At Warner’s insistence, she and her mother left Greenwich Village for a more suitable – ‘spacious’ would be the word – apartment in Brooklyn: they could have had a bed ...”

“... does not think the so-called defenders should have allowed him. However he manages to save the ball and throws it back into play, shaking his head and saying, as a reproof to his own team, ‘’Ave a word, ’ave a word.’ I take this to mean ‘Pull your socks up’ or as they would say in Yorkshire, ‘Frame yourselves.’Having espoused the attitudes ...”

“... of a royal house guest, the stage-struck Edward Augustus, Duke of York, the younger brother of George III. It seems that Foote, in his cocksure way, had been boasting his prowess as a horseman. As some kind of test or wager he was given one of the duke’s most ‘mettlesome’ stallions to ride. At the first touch of the spur the horse reared ...”

“... the hedge fund Marshall Wace, with $50 million of seed capital raised from friends, family and George Soros. It now manages $69 billion in assets. Like many hedge fund managers, Marshall casts himself as a disruptive outsider. Even those who say they know him well describe him as detached, almost inscrutable. But almost all agree that his worldview has ...”

“... who sit on thrones or send armies into battle. Reagan’s War on Drugs, as total a failure as George W. Bush’s War on Terror, may indirectly have led to almost as many deaths – by destabilising Colombia, for example. It would be hard to think of any organised crime outfit responsible for a fraction of those two butcher’s-bills, in spite of all the ...”

“... a war on evil sounds, if anything, yet more quixotic than that other jihad waged on abstraction, George W. Bush’s war against terror. The trouble with a war on evil is that it has an air of pragmatic contradiction. Making war to end war-making may, as the just war tradition shows, manage to shrug off this air. But what about doing evil, in order to stop ...”

“... efforts to get her to dance with him, finally claims her as his partner. At the Netherfield ball our heroine has had to endure two clumsy turns of the floor with Mr Collins, before enjoying a dance with an unnamed officer who has conversed happily about Mr Wickham’s popularity among his fellow militia members. She is talking to Charlotte Lucas when ...”

“... doing more for themselves. The ‘most important anti-crime programme ever known is a dad playing ball with his son’. Of course his vision for the state would mean great effort, even sacrifice, but weren’t they up to the challenge? The West was won in Missouri. The first mile of the Interstate was laid in Missouri. In Missouri they built steamships ...”

“... children. Wealthy, intelligent and good looking, she made her debut at the age of 18 at a ball in Carlisle where, family tradition had it, she was the belle of the evening. A drawing of her some years later shows an intelligent, conventionally pretty face, the hair piled up behind a centre parting, large eyes, small chin, a nose sharpening into middle ...”

“... week’s visit to Newstead Abbey, his Nottinghamshire home, with Hobhouse and his cousin and heir, George Byron. Even when he was there, Caroline Lamb could not leave him alone. A page arrived with a letter from her; Hobhouse suspected the boy, who had a ‘dreadful body’, to be Caroline herself – she was fond of performing a similar trick in London. If it ...”

“... Republic with its cynical and fluctuating anti-Americanism didn’t have long to run in fact, but George Marchais and Jacques Duclos and the others weren’t to know that, any more than they did when they became the ‘party of order’ once more and supported the ‘normalisation’ of Czechoslovakia a few months later. Somewhere between those two ...”