“... and funny’. At least they make each other laugh.) Tim Allan, a former Labour aide who may, rather marvellously, be sued by the organisers of the event for leaking the story to the Times, has said that ‘it is a matter of huge public interest that John Humphrys was getting paid thousands of pounds to tell audiences that . . . the job of the BBC ...”

“... broadcasting talent (unless you count Alistair Cooke and Clive James, who provide epigraphs). This may be because Lawson overlooked Connolly when it came to changing the names, or it may be because he forgot Connolly isn’t a member of the royal family. ‘I think you get into such an alternative Britain, once you start ...”

“... or any of the events for things that might actually have happened. Conversely, the disclaimer may instantly arouse suspicions in a certain kind of reader: surely you need to deny that your characters are portraits of real people only if that’s precisely what they are. It seems slightly foolish, therefore, to draw attention to yourself with protestations ...”

“... They found George Bush in the White House gym. He was working out.More paranoid readers may be able to detect some significance in the fact that tinyurl.com/bush sends you not to anywhere on the official White House site, but to a story from the 15 May 2003 edition of the Globe and Mail about an office block ...”

“... are called Leigh and Woodhouse, the one a Sheffield Wednesday fan, driven to authorship it may be in the hope of taking his mind off the poignant decline in the standing of that pleasingly named old club, the other a supporter of Aston Villa, or the ‘claret and blues’, as some of us were brought up to know them, though now that teams seem to take ...”

“... with flashbacks to events of the night before. ‘Call yourself a New Puritan?’ the reader may well indignantly ask, but this isn’t really breaking Rule No.5, because the flashbacks are actually occurring in the narrative’s present in the narrator’s hungover memory (and, as if further mitigation were necessary, one of his drinks was spiked with ...”

“... the BBC that spun, should never have become the issue it has become, to the point where the BBC may suffer lasting damage at the hands of a vindictive regime. The hard fact is that the evidence, whether spun or unspun, was, we’re now entitled to believe, false, and in my own view (see Short Cuts, 19 June) is likely to have been sufficiently negative in ...”

“... In mid-May, as the Sri Lankan army completed its rout of the Tamil Tigers, President Mahinda Rajapaksa described the scorched-earth campaign as ‘an unprecedented humanitarian operation’. Others were more inclined to see it as a calamity. Among them was the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had travelled to Sri Lanka with David Miliband to argue, in vain, for a truce ...”

“... I think, to dump the phrase, certainly when it’s used as loosely as this. It doesn’t help. It may however be thought to help MI5. Restoring or boosting its reputation was the main reason this book was commissioned. Whatever the truth or otherwise of the ‘Wilson plot’ and other accusations, they were thought to have ‘damaged public confidence’ in ...”

“... philosopher Thomas Davidson, who invited his friend to meet ‘the woman you ought to marry’. It may not be clear who saw her first, but everyone seems to have agreed that Alice Howe Gibbens was destined for William James. Having followed up the proffered advice, William himself dashed off a letter declaring that he had just met ‘the future Mrs ...”

“... we read on to find out. Perhaps we do know, so we read on to see if the killer will be caught. It may be that we know the culprit’s identity, and know they’ll be caught, but we read on to find out how, and why they did it. Or perhaps we know all these things, but, having been introduced to a set of characters, we stay to get to know them ...”

“... if not the kitchen sink then at least the bath. Alternatively the presence of these bathtubs may be a sign that the free-standing episode related in Book 10 (traditionally called the ‘Doloneia’) was, as most scholars now believe, composed by someone other than ‘Homer’, who was a bit more prone to nod than the writer he emulated. But the magically ...”

“... In​ 1906, May Aldington, a writer and innkeeper, published a novel called Love-letters that Caused a Divorce. It tells the story of Kitty Yorke, who falls in love with a married man. She abandons her marriage in order to run away with her lover, but eventually, after desertion and long hardship, returns to her husband ...”

“... was a possibility. More straightforwardly, people do crazy things out of sexual frustration and it may be that Asquith was ejaculating words in the direction of Venetia Stanley because he couldn’t offload anything else. There was certainly a feeling of frustrated lust about one embarrassing episode when he squandered government resources arranging an ...”

“... global networks of power directly descended from the age of imperialism. Their political outriders may be cynical hacks, but public support for the fossil fuel status quo is all too real. The carbon coalition seems death-driven, defiant of expert advice. Centrist liberals are loud in expressing outrage, but shrink away when push comes to shove. There are ...”