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“... that any infraction they commit will expose their families to danger. There are no bandana-wearing revolutionary heroes in The Queue, and no cartoon baddies either. Abdel Aziz explores the ephemera of mundane bureaucratic viciousness – official reports, state television announcements, the grammar of the regime’s self-image – alongside the worlds ...”

“... return, his uncle commissioned two fine portraits. The American expat Benjamin West painted him wearing a splendid Māori flax cloak, standing among a striking assortment of South Sea trophies, and his friend Joshua Reynolds underlined the point by posing the romantically unwigged young Banks with a globe and a seascape in the distant background. His left ...”

“... cross-dressing was a political act in a different sense, a campaign to confront oppressive norms: wearing drag in the street was part of that programme. Ira Siff and Keith Jurosko had a more straitened notion of theatrical display. As Keith explained at the Traverse that day, he had only once ventured into the outside world in drag, and that was in ...”

“... making a fuss about, it’s argued, it’s not sexual assault, but Harman’s book makes clear how wearing and dispiriting it is to spend decades in a male-dominated environment where male primacy is continually and aggressively reasserted. ‘The law,’ she writes, ‘is now there to protect women’ – sexual harassment in the workplace is classed as a ...”

“... undertakers hover in their closing pages), then at least from the crystal set to iPlayer. David Hendy’s book has the strengths of an insider’s account, packed with detail and anecdotes, shrewd in its assessment of personalities, light on socioeconomic change. Simon Potter’s is more academic and astringent. Potter tends to be critical where Hendy ...”

“... of a solution, by fleshing out the original makers of the myth – Joe and Rose Kennedy. David Nasaw’s The Patriarch is a comprehensive account of Joseph Kennedy’s ascent from lace-curtain respectability to extraordinary wealth and political influence, followed by exile to the margins and vicarious achievement through his sons. Nasaw shows that ...”

“... to dispose of their dog, for no particular reason except to ‘simplify their life’. The boy, David, of kindergarten age, can hardly share this hope but makes no plea in the animal’s favour: ‘The dog has crammed itself behind the pipes beneath the kitchen sink. David squats before him, blowing gently on his ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley, One-Dimensional Woman by Nina Power and The Meaning of David Cameron by Richard Seymour, all of which grew from their authors’ blogposts. Such works amounted to ‘a kernel of a whole new left public’, according to another of Fisher’s friends, Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural studies at the University of ...”

“... who had come for Christmas dinner. These included his two daughters, Lucy and Lynda. ‘Lynda was wearing her Christmas gift from her father,’ Caro writes, ‘a loose-fitting red shift; [Johnson] reached out and bundled up the fabric, to prove, he said with a smile, that she wasn’t in a family way.’ Lynda was 19 at the time. How the journalists ...”

“... Coalition Ass is funny. The idea, as well as the drawing, of ‘The Right Hon. Dress Suit, wearing his Jimmy Thomas’ is funny. (George Lansbury said he could never again see Thomas without thinking of it.) Low was also remarkable for his good humour. This is exemplified in his Lloyd George, whom he never managed to draw as other than lovable; in the ...”

“... civilian populations.’ This is nonsense. The idea that UN workers, eating imported food and wearing flak jackets, paid perhaps $10,000 per month, with generous leave, ready to be evacuated at a moment’s notice, share the same suffering would appear ludicrous to the inhabitants of Sarajevo, Mogadishu or Kigali and to the local staff of relief ...”

“... depending on insider knowledge only others in the trade need feel troubled or titillated by. David Lodge, quoted on an Adair dust jacket saying that The Death of the Author is ‘brilliant, worthy of Nabokov’, is doing something of this kind, pretending innocence, tactfully avoiding the question of pastiche, of who’s actually in charge of this ...”

“... to find out his height and weight. His careful accounts of weigh-ins take note of what he was wearing, whether he was carrying a sword and what he had in his pockets. When it came to his height, however, he was defeated. There was no easy way of doing it and according to his biographer Kate Bennett, Aubrey was reduced to saying that he could get one hand ...”

“... Rodchenko were in exile in Hollywood and working for Busby Berkeley. Being an anti-Communist means wearing a robe, drinking a Scotch and genuflecting before a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Yet no film gets closer to the way politics was felt during the Cold War: the miasma of repression (political, sexual and otherwise), the tension between American affluence ...”