“... for themselves by taking outrageous risks. But the war reporters I knew best who died, such as David Blundy in El Salvador in 1989 and Marie Colvin in Syria in 2012, were highly experienced. Their only mistake was to go to dangerous places so frequently that there was a high chance that they would one day be hit by a bullet or a bomb. Messy guerrilla ...”

“... realm of the airport showed up as an orange nimbus against the purple night sky. In the morning, David Cameron was holding an emergency press conference on the television stuck in the top left-hand corner of the breakfast room: ‘Work is at the heart of a responsible society,’ he politely hectored the assembled hacks, while we sloped off on our walking ...”

“... they hear on the news. While they drive, the family listen to Kendrick Lamar, Laurie Anderson and David Bowie. The couple seem like cool parents who will raise charming and precocious children; their break-up just adds to their refusal to adhere to convention. One day, in a bookshop, the narrator finds herself staring at the photograph of a male author on a ...”

“... the lines of Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992). As a comic extravaganza it salutes David Lodge, whose character Morris Zapp gets a walk-on part. But for Binet, riffing knowingly on narrative theory isn’t an end in itself. As well as being a kind of allegory, and an elaborate joke, his conspiracy plot is a way of arranging non-fictional events ...”

“... Hobhouse recorded in his diary, ‘walked up the stairs.’ It was of course Caroline, wearing a page’s uniform. Fearing an elopement, which, Byron later assured him, would certainly have taken place but for his intervention, Hobhouse insisted that she left. Caroline refused and tried to stab herself, being restrained by Byron. Eventually, after ...”

“... were scores of functions which by law only the lord chancellor could perform, and Lord Falconer, wearing a morning coat instead of the splendid black and gold robe, was sworn in as a nightwatchman lord chancellor. The joke went round Whitehall that the legislation enshrining the new dispensation was to consist of a single clause giving press releases from ...”

“... at the Armistice but its commandant, Mary Allen, carried on, despite being arrested in 1921 for wearing police uniform. The CCWO connected women operating in male-dominated professions, providing practical as well as moral support, and Astor and Matheson were equally active on the home front. The League of Women, established in 1923 under their ...”

“... masculine sceptic while Mulder is the feminine believer. (What a man! I would exclaim as I watched David Duchovny in his little swimsuit. What a man!) It is not in the riverine quality of her voice, banked by reeds, sometimes pierced low by waterbirds. It is not even in her partner’s reaction, his one liquid larger pupil, the soft hopeless hope that he turns ...”

“... crowds increasingly ‘decomposed into solitary consumers’. The rise of ‘superstar DJs’ like David Guetta and Fatboy Slim displaced the ranks of faceless techno artists who hid behind pseudonyms like T99, LFO and B12. Dancers have been increasingly monitored and vetted, steered into ticketed venues and subjected to invasive security checks, often ...”

“... an undraped bed right next to him. In 1946 the old masters of the camera, on the other hand, were wearing wrinkled shirt-sleeves without neckwear, the skinny Stieglitz lolling and polishing his glasses, a white lock falling over his brow, his glittering gaze fixed beyond us; the plump Flaherty with his hands on spread knees and two fingers delicately ...”

“... Yet only a few years after the Beau’s creditors forced him into exile, the young dandies were wearing make-up, enormously high shirt collars, stiff lapels on their coats and corsets to produce wasp-waists, with padding on the chest, the rump and the calves. It was in response to these excesses of dandy fashion that Brummell’s doctrine was ...”

“... 1959, when this film was made, Grant had spent some of his most famously ridiculous screen moments wearing clothes that were not his own: a feathery negligée in Bringing Up Baby, a leopard-skin dressing-gown in My Favourite Wife, full drag in I Was a Male War Bride. The more renownedly well-fitting his own clothes were, the funnier he was in someone ...”

“... work he was doing as Minister of Housing, and the pleasure he took in drinking whisky and wearing red socks. There is also a lot of Party-speak, epitomised in ‘Joe Slovo: A Brilliant Teacher’ by the Chinese Shu Zhan or Harold Wolpe’s tribute to ‘the richness and innovativeness of his theoretical and strategic contributions’. Much of this ...”

“... military officer of a Warsaw Pact country, then watch it.’ On 31 May 1944, Major Frank Thompson, wearing the British uniform that should have protected him, was captured along with the Bulgarian Partisans to whom he was attached, near Likatova, north of Sofia, found guilty at a staged trial, and publicly shot on 5 June. His bearing throughout was by all ...”

“... an epigraph from Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964). Awaiting his mistress, who will shortly reappear wearing little more than a ‘black lace underthing’, Moses H. reflects on ‘what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power . . . After the late failure of radical hopes.’ And ...”