“... women, they felt, looked more attractive covered up. However, some of the sisters who began wearing the hijab did not stop there: they put on dark flowing robes; then they covered their faces and began to wear gloves. They also wanted to play an equal role in the Islamic Society. One veiled woman insisted on remaining behind a screen during a meeting ...”

“... told him: ‘They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true.’ The grandfather, David Cartwright, aka the Old Bastard or OB for short, knows what he’s talking about, as he was the power behind the throne at the Park for decades. The grandson, River Cartwright, once a promising recruit at the Park, has just been relegated to a dead-end job ...”

“... Frémaux went on TV to insist he knew nothing of Depp’s trial for assaulting Amber Heard. He was wearing a blue and yellow badge emblazoned with the words ‘STOP THE WAR’. The contradiction between the festival’s support for Ukraine and its silence on Palestine is, of course, ‘only the reflection of the situation globally’. But it does try to stay ...”

“... cheap coats, which they felt belonged to the white world. Indians could wear them without really wearing them. What they were to be judged on was their Indian clothes. Such a bifocal outlook could easily descend into hypocrisy. Asians liked to trade anecdotes about the grossness and immorality of Westerners. Yet they still sold them pornography and alcohol ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I was part of a small team working on a political magazine for international distribution. He was wearing shades and slumped down on a chair next to my desk. Then, without any preamble he lowered his voice: ‘I killed Rahim last night.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Rahim, aka Clinton Smith, had escaped from prison in California with a fellow ...”