“... painter Joseph Farington, described as ‘a very strong likeness’. Taylor is shown in profile, wearing his own hair arranged in a long pigtail and a curious frizzy headphone which covers his ear. He has a short concave forehead, a long straight nose, a round, prominent chin and a huge jowl shaded to look excessively meaty and anything but skull-like. But ...”

“... a field’. Probably the most beautiful and attentive drawing had been done five years earlier by David Hockney, in which Auden appears wrapped up in himself and a cigarette: ‘I kept thinking,’ Hockney reportedly said afterwards, ‘if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ Not everyone was struck in quite that way, but everyone was ...”

“... tools presented with love from the working people of Krasnodar, a Vietnamese portrait of him wearing a real suit and with real medals glued to the canvas … Toadies of the world, unite! But what sort of man, what kind of leader, had accepted this junk as his due? Few people remember Brezhnev kindly. At best, he is a pathetic figure with bushy eyebrows ...”

“... similarities between the histories of the two men, two hundred years apart. In his biography, David Macey traces Fanon’s contradictory life from the colonial Caribbean island of Martinique, where he was born in 1925, to France and on through his passionate involvement in the Algerian revolution, to his early death from leukaemia in 1961 at the age of ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... Club, since his arrest on Swedish rape allegations. He was effectively under house arrest and wearing an electronic tag on his leg. He would sign in at Beccles police station every afternoon, proving he hadn’t done a runner in the night. Assange and his associates kept hackers’ hours: up all night and asleep half the day, one of the little bits of ...”

“... aware of the difference between a ‘life of purity’, such as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted ...”

“... by American generals who had directed major operations in Iraq. Both Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus considered themselves experts in counterinsurgency – the respectable term for trying to suppress domestic resistance to a military occupation. British soldiers were supposed to fall in line with American thinking and avoid making too many ...”

“... warning or explanation at the home of what appears to be an Edwardian family of five. It is wearing tennis shoes and a Harvard scarf and stays for seventeen years, making a nuisance of itself by tearing up books, dropping objects into the garden pond and, occasionally, simply standing with its nose against the wall and refusing to move. A panel from ...”

“... for the open-ended soliloquy. We paid and Miguel disappeared for some time, to return, painted, wearing a cushma, with necklaces and red feather, attended by the monkey-man trickster in the one-piece, skintight black outfit. Miguel’s sermon, a rhythmic threnody without pause, visibly moved Beliza. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she listened, seeming to ...”

“... he were back at his desk in the bank. The presiding officer, who’d been sitting before the vest-wearing officials, myopically going through papers, turned to me and told me, firmly, to leave. An older BSF officer with a gun gently escorted me out; I reminded the three men I’d see them again the next day, and naturally they pretended they hadn’t heard ...”

“... leaker seemed. Snowden was interviewed on 6 June last year in a hotel room in Hong Kong. He was wearing a grey shirt and glasses; Poitras filmed him with a hand-held cam. He had already sent Greenwald and Poitras the documents, many thousands of them, on memory sticks: there was no reason for the journalists to be there, though they needed to reassure ...”

“... pen obliterating any programme listing that included black or Irish people, gays, lesbians or David Frost’. The relationship cooled when Ken junior joined the Labour Party and ceased completely when he became leader of the Greater London Council, but for a time they lived under the same roof in an intimate and sometimes disagreeable household that ...”

“... I go up the street to Sesame, the organic shop, slipping on a green corduroy jacket. I’m also wearing an old pair of green corduroy trousers so it looks like a suit. It makes me remember how Gielgud used to be excited – or pretended to be – by corduroy. ‘Corduroy! My dear!’ And his eyebrows would go up as if it were some kind of statement. Which ...”

“... escaping to, Rio: ‘Imagine 1.5 million people listening to the Charleston and every one of them wearing white trousers,’ Bender sighs. It’s the return of the repressed Soviet entrepreneurial urge that unites Little Russia – a misleading term, given that many of its inhabitants come from Lithuania, Georgia, Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan. Here they are ...”