“... staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he said, ‘but we’ll go about our business.’ He was wearing a blue cap that said: ‘Trump. 45th President’. He then spoke to CBS. ‘Someone else died – we’re horrified at that. But this is not going to stop Republicans from participating in the democratic process.’‘What about security?’‘I think ...”

“... one would expect from any collection of pictures, except for the jarring and very public Star of David which feels eerily as if it had invaded the private space of the pictures without its bearers having noticed. There were 1536 such pictures in the first, 1994 French edition; 1834 in the 1995 edition; another 497 in a January 1996 supplement; and a further ...”

“... I spoke with a middle-aged woman standing next to a large York Momentum banner. She was wearing a ‘Corbynista’ T-shirt (she told me she’d had it printed herself); next to her a man was wearing a ‘Superman’ T-shirt, blue with ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ spelled out in red and yellow block capitals on the ...”

“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... diplomats have all called on Thein Sein. Each has returned cautious, but unmistakably impressed. David Cameron, who this week became the most important visitor so far, urged us all to ‘pay tribute … to the leadership of President Thein Sein and his government, which has been prepared to release political prisoners, hold by-elections and legalise ...”

“... man at a party in Paris. Balzac has tremendous fun describing the man. First his clothes: he is wearing ‘a white waistcoat embroidered with gold’ and ‘a shirt-frill of English lace, yellow with age, the magnificence of which a queen might have envied’. Then the face: ‘That dark face was full of angles and furrowed deep in every direction; the chin ...”

“... Acker had her hair bleached and buzz-cut and further divided into roughly razored squares. She’s wearing something black and hairy, with clanking hardware on ears and fingers and a tie like a noose round her neck. Her answers are straightforward, well formed, uncompromising but charming, with something indescribably touching in their delivery, like she’s ...”

“... such devices, had in this instance failed. At the time of the blast, Guardsman Wakefield was wearing standard body armour, which provides protection to the front and back of the torso. Projectiles entered his neck and upper chest, the latter through the unprotected side area of his vest. A forensic pathologist later said the neck injury severed one of ...”

“... inexplicably, the wandering right hand of Chico, whom they had long since written off. Harpo, wearing a fruit-covered hat, plucked an apple and an orange, Chico dodged and hurled them back, somebody lowered the curtain and the three Marx Brothers were four. Show business is full of incongruities. Gummo, drafted into the Army and told by Minnie that they ...”

“... landlords. I first met Ruby at an Acorn workshop called ‘How to Beat Your Landlord’. She was wearing a hi-vis jacket and taking part in a role-play, practising techniques for confronting recalcitrant landlords in their offices. A few weeks later, I heard her speak at the Acorn-led occupation of a TSB branch in Tottenham. Acorn claimed that the TSB was ...”

“... David Gibson was a man stiff and parsonical; by all accounts the sort of man who got things done. You could say he was obsessed with ridding Glasgow of its slums, with turning them into something bright and high and unquestionably modern. That’s what he wanted, and he’d already made vast advances towards getting it when he became convener of Glasgow Corporation’s housing committee in 1964 ...”

“... fringe groups. At the culmination of his triumphant visit to the UK last month, Modi, addressing David and a sari-clad Samantha Cameron and a 60,000-strong audience at Wembley Stadium, mentioned, in order to earn multicultural brownie points, one of the icons of the bhakti movement, Kabir, a Muslim weaver’s son, unmindful of Kabir’s distaste for bogus ...”

“... met, she did her self-portrait in gouache and watercolour while he did her portrait in oil. She is wearing the same hat and dress in each picture, so they were certainly begun at the same time. But the resemblance ends there. Cassatt’s Cassatt is thirtyish, fresh-faced, erect, cheerful, in front of a pale daffodil background. Degas’s Cassatt is leaning ...”

“... This was the case with Colin Powell in the wake of Operation Desert Storm, and with David Petraeus when the Iraq Surge of 2007-08 seemed, briefly, to represent a historic triumph. At other times, imperious civilians keep generals on a short leash, preferring compliance to professional advice. This was the case on both occasions when Donald ...”