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“... thought polite. When he passed, Chávez, instinctive politician that he is, at once flicked the ball on to the feet of the Hand of God. (He originally wanted to be a baseball player. Football is not his game.) What was important was that his largesse had secured the Copa for his country, thereby strengthening his popular appeal at home, enhancing his ...”

“... himself isn’t like that: he’s much more feline. The actor who catches this side of him is Simon McBurney in The Loudest Voice in the Room, the dramatisation of Gabriel Sherman’s book about Fox News. The Loudest Voice is the best depiction to date of how systematised, institutionalised sexual harassment works (and is recommended even to, or perhaps ...”

“... this is in comparison with the clichéridden public pronouncements he was given to making: George Ball, who twice campaigned against him, has written of ‘a plodding fivestar general uttering pedestrian language written by some journalistic hack with all the grace of a gun-carriage being hauled across cobblestones’. It appears from the diaries that ...”

“... and prepared as balls or cakes, was the exportable product. To use it, the dyer ground up the ball of dye and dissolved it in a vat of alkali. This reduced the indigo to leuco-indigo. The solution did its magic as before. The cloth when taken from the vat of greenish dye turned blue on exposure to the air. In Indigo, Jenny Balfour-Paul glosses these ...”

“... of the first millennium ad, the road not taken at all. Less mild-mannered than Dalrymple, Warwick Ball in Rome in the East (1999) dismisses it as an academic ‘myth’. Ball is a distinguished archaeologist who has spent fifty years digging in the regions of West Asia that would have been a key part of the Silk Road. To ...”

“... Australians, and Gooch will escort him off the field, brawny arm wrapped around delicate shoulder. Simon Heffer, in the Evening Standard, wrote a more ill-tempered piece, in which he deplored the fact that Mr M. Atherton (Manchester Grammar and Cambridge) was frozen out of Gooch, G.’s secondary-modern circle. The likes of Gooch – the dependable sergeant ...”

“... pseudo-archaic proverbial sagacity, fails to disguise self-pity. In life, he said, one throws a ball and hopes that one’s friends will form a wall that enables it to return: but it usually falls, as if it had hit a wet sheet. Huffington, concerned to help us to understand the deterioration of Picasso’s relations with Marie-Thérèse Walter, picks this ...”

“... women could still hear his cries through the prison walls. His keepers were a shoemaker, Antoine Simon, and his wife, who dressed the child as a sans-culotte, and tormented him. Marie Antoinette could sometimes catch sight of her son through a crack in the wall; this, Marie-Thérèse remembered, became her mother’s ‘sole occupation’. Marie Antoinette ...”

“... affection, in the gentle manner of Yes, Minister. Like Sir Humphrey in the television programme, Simon Goldstone fears action might prove ‘counter-productive’ – an odd word to choose since there isn’t any productivity to be countered. Likewise Camp’s politicians are united by suspicion of altruism or crusades. They also exhibit a paradoxical ...”

“... mood. The immediate inspiration of Religio Laici was the work of a French Catholic priest, Richard Simon, who had written a crafty but temperate essay to undermine the basic Protestant position by investigating the obvious corruption of the Old Testament text. Reliance on Scripture as the sole authority for belief was, as he gravely maintained, compromised by ...”

“... Parliamentary Candidates into the strobes, to question, canvass and press the sweaty flesh. Simon Hughes of the Liberal Democrats, the local MP for Southwark and Bermondsey, regularly boasts of his clubbing credentials, gasping for credibility each time he does so. This combination of the carefree and the caring may not be Utopian, but it’s full of ...”

“... why descriptions of Brophy return to certain words: glitter, sparkle, shards of light. The Snow Ball (1964), republished by Faber in 2020, is full of brilliance: showers of snow, of peppermint creams, of women who pile their hair ‘as though they were wearing high heels on their heads’ or talk about Casanova attending the first performance of Don ...”

“... is, I think, only transiently applicable: a classic for, rather than of, the 20th century (even if Simon Winder, editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics series launched this month, said recently that ‘there is no reason why Molesworth should not sit alongside The Trial, Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses’). As far as I can see, what takes Molesworth beyond the ...”

“... cast of characters including three skeletons, 15 aardvarks, Quasimodo, Vinnie the Venus Fly Trap, Simon the Sundew and Pete the Pitcher plant. In my story, an old sofa that had been dumped beneath a tree became the aardvarks’ bed. The sofa has now been taken away by the police for DNA samples. I shall never tell a ravine story again. Housing estates have ...”

“... by how hopeless the Cheltenham girls were at batting when I arrived,’ said Pat, ‘tossing the ball about.’ Aged 82 and looking not a day over 60, she stood up in my kitchen and imitated a Cheltenham girl tossing a ball into the air with a bat in an ethereal, ladylike, lightly bouncing way. ‘I’d been well trained ...”