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“... of Thorpe’s tour of South-West England’s beaches in a hovercraft, from whose running board, wearing a trilby and a three-piece suit, he would address the trunked and bikinied masses. ‘Britannia Roused, or the Coalition Monsters Destroyed’ by Thomas Rowlandson (1784). In the election of October 1974, Wilson got a bare majority, with 319 ...”

“... The back gallery, intended for visitors, was mostly taken up by the press. Dickens remembered wearing out his knees ‘by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery of the old House of Commons’. Women visitors (a maximum of 14) were banished to the attic, which had a small circular opening in the floor. They could hear voices from below, but ...”

“... back in 1959 and first published in 1980. A comparison between the two books, Vasily’s and David’s, does not do the later one much good. As an outpouring of feeling, and as a series of sombre representations of the condition of modern Israel, To the End of the Land is often impressive, sometimes touching. As a novel it simply does not come off. This ...”

“... and an eagerly embraced opportunity for the people who’ve written books on the phenomenon. Like David Kalat’s A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series (1997) and Steve Ryfle’s feebly named Japan’s Favourite Mon-Star (1998), William Tsutsui’s Godzilla on My Mind profits from the haziness of most people’s recollections by ...”

“... not just that having the ‘wrong’ address can spell doom (though even this is not as bad as wearing the wrong clothes, as Lucien discovers in Illusions perdues); rather, Balzac subtly presents a given street or area in such a way as to make it an expression of the moral state of the inhabitants. Esther van Gobseck, for example, lives in an area marked ...”

“... altered and three were quashed. It’s easy to see why so many of these cases go to appeal. But as David Ormerod, the law commissioner, said to the Justice Select Committee, the outcome of these appeals – like those of the original trials – ‘are often perceived as illogical or unfair’. In May 2010 two South London gangs, Shanks and Guns and the ...”

“... standing. In the case of Elspeth Howe there were muttered suspicions that she would be the one wearing the trousers. The Conservative Parliamentary Party in its default gentleman’s club mode likes nothing more than chuntering on about the perils of a Lady Macbeth. (Elspeth Howe waited 15 years to extract her revenge, helping her husband write the ...”

“... the end is a return: ‘The crease is still sharp in the trousers.’ The clothes are ready for wearing on Sunday, and this is what they will look like when the man who wears them has gone. The after-feeling is the surer for being subdued. And this goes with the emphasis of Agee’s title, from a passage of Ecclesiasticus, an apocryphal witness of sacred ...”

“... award. That took her to New York in 1956. It was the first time she had been there, and she was wearing ‘a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal’. She was poor, without feeling it, and I’d guess she lived very simply. ‘I had the feeling that if I needed money I ...”

“... good-looking, charismatic and ultra-violent lesbian freelance who, the first time we meet her, is wearing Ray-Bans, a white leather jacket and white jeans. Rumour has it that she started as a debt collector and liked the buzz so much that she progressed to providing ‘drugs for government ministries … call girls for officials … information about ...”

“... include) when Women’s Wear changed his copy in one piece to sound dismissive of ordinary women wearing high fashion. He is scathing about most fashion writing, practised in his view by those interested only in sensational headlines, with no real knowledge of the field, and no sense of how to dress themselves. (His mathematical instinct is present again in ...”

“... out to be a Spanish chef capable and indeed only too pleased to produce delicious pre-Elizabeth David food for the ravenous Radletts.13 February. ‘God’s honour’ we used to swear as boys. This remembered in the middle of an acute attack of arthritis pain this morning when I’m marooned on the sofa, cold, thirsty but unable to move. ‘I don’t know ...”

“... Art Scene in London, which featured several of her paintings. Its curator, the art historian David Alan Mellor, had been fascinated by the subject in general and by Boty in particular since, as a 13-year-old, he saw Ken Russell’s television film Pop Goes the Easel. Shown as part of the arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the ...”

“... culminated in a 2003 visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial centre in Jerusalem, where, wearing a kippa, he declared that fascism had been an ‘absolute evil’. That same year he floated the idea of giving voting rights to immigrants. For hardliners this was too much; Alessandra Mussolini claimed that Fini was betraying her grandfather’s legacy ...”

“... The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is called in French: Pietr the Latvian. Similarly, the second Maigret, another of my favourites, Le Charretier de ‘la Providence’, also from 1931, has ...”