“... always assumed that since Mercutio with cheerful derision calls his enemy ‘King of Cats’, ‘Prince of Cats’, making allusion to rat-catching and the possession of nine lives; and since furthermore Elizabethans appear to have called their Tom-cats, Tib-cats – then the chances are strong that our still-surviving habit of calling the occasional cat ...”

“... and its ties to bin Laden family assets; the influence in Washington of the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar; no-bid contracts; and so on. But there is no need for conspiracy theories: never has a conspiracy been less interested in concealment. The report of the Energy Task Force led by Dick Cheney, which was crafted early in the Bush presidency by oil ...”

“... name of Tsentoroi – ‘i vsyo, that’s all.’ Civil servants, whom Russians ever since Peter the Great have called the chinovniki, also have to pay their dues. Every few months, all government employees, including policemen, doctors and teachers, are obliged to transfer a portion of their salary to the Akhmad-Khadzhi Kadyrov Fund, or FAK, a private ...”

“... narratologists, who rejoice in the apparatus and the neologisms; they have what Gerald Prince, a senior narratologist himself, calls an ‘infatuation with science even when they are talking about the process of storytelling, something understood by every human society known to history’. The novelist Christine Brooke-Rose, in an essay resigning ...”

“... of plaited silk hung on the wall by the window in that same room where Ivan Ilyich and the old Prince died.’ She began to write an ‘exploration’, which Sargeson helped her sell. (It came out in 1957 as Owls Do Cry, marketed as a ‘novel’; in it, among other things, a boy, Toby Withers, struggles under the ‘velvet cloak’ of epilepsy.) Sargeson ...”

“... opinion in the West did better than this. Among journalists, the Washington Post correspondents Peter Baker and Susan Glasser have produced a hard-hitting survey of the new Russia, Kremlin Rising, that puts the palliators of the Financial Times to shame.2 Among historians, Richard Pipes, at one with Malia in hostility to Communism, but in temperament and ...”

“... when he was feeling lovelorn following a breakup. Perhaps they simply wanted to please the prince, to be a part of his floating ensemble theatre.Reports describe Roth as a smooth talker, experienced mindgamer, practised seducer (‘He was not averse to cuckolding inattentive husbands,’ Taylor writes, an oddly passive wording) and crafty tactician ...”

“... was added to the bad ‘news’. Women become clocks, always ticking away, like the crocodile in Peter Pan who had swallowed the alarm clock. Women must marry and have children immediately, skipping the attractions of further education or interesting careers. There were no men and yet it was every young woman’s painful duty to try to find and hang onto a ...”

“... itself? In the tenth century, the legend went, four envoys arrived in Kiev to persuade its pagan prince of the merits of their faith – a Jewish emissary from the Khazar empire, a Muslim from the Bulgar Khanate, a Catholic from Rome, a Greek Orthodox from Byzantium. In choosing the last, Vladimir brought Russia its form of Christianity. The story, Furman ...”

“... of Lubetkin and Cranbrook could just as easily be damned by conservative aesthetes in the mould of Prince Charles as having yoked the English working man to alien, totalitarian forms of dwelling.Lubetkin, who died in 1990, gave his critics plenty to work with. He did have an ego; he deployed his enormous intellect with more force than tact. He and his ...”

“... climb the fire escape, to play the games and tell myself the stories I invented in my childspace.Prince Monolulu, who has since become a pub, lived in Fitzrovia and was a regular passer-by. He was immensely tall and ebony black. He wore exotic flowing robes (exotic, that is, for those days) and always had brilliantly coloured cock feathers in his hair. He ...”

“... then declined to answer them.As Javid left the sports centre, the queen arrived, accompanied by Prince William. Sue Harris, the head of the borough’s Environmental Health Department, took them round. As soon as the queen appeared in the main hall, Mrs Jafari, the dead man’s widow, let out the most chilling howl, as if the terrible fact of what had ...”

“... from Marseille to Oran and come overland in the hope of obtaining a visa to Lisbon. Ugarte (Peter Lorre), a forger and procurer of documents, asks Rick to look after two sets of safe-conduct papers until his clients arrive. ‘You despise me, don’t you?’ he says to Rick. ‘You object to the kind of business I do, huh? But think of all those poor ...”