“... 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 ...”

“... she’s ‘such a Tory’. This is not a time for girly-swot politics talk. The ‘court of King David’, she observes, feels as if it is ‘actually the government’. ‘They are all here, the ones that eat, drink, party together … We all holiday together … we text each other bypassing the civil servants … it’s enough to repulse the ordinary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... overwhelming desire to re-establish sovereignty over the peninsula, demilitarised since the Camp David Accords. The extent of the Islamists’ deference to the military was made plain when the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood was forced to retract derogatory remarks he had made about the military’s willingness to bend to the wishes of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in tears.’ When he had become a celebrity, men as notoriously irreligious as John Wilkes and David Hume attended church services to hear him preach. ‘Tristram pleads his cause well, tho’ he does not believe one word of it,’ Wilkes noted with satisfaction. Reading his sermons, Thomas Gray thought that they showed ‘a sensible heart’, but that you ...”

“... of groups of soldiers forcing young men to undress and cross a checkpoint in the Gaza Strip wearing only their underpants, or dividing Palestinian women into two queues – those they judged to be pretty on one side, ugly on the other – before allowing them to pass. Bethlehem’s residents, in common with Palestinians in the rest of the occupied West ...”

“... I would guess, advise Park View on the shot on the front of its spring 2015 newsletter: a girl wearing a mask with the Union flag painted on it, her eyes half-shut behind the eyeholes, her mouth unsmiling under the little slit. She looks as though she has been forced by agents of an authoritarian, anti-individualistic ideology to cover her face in a way ...”

“... Requiem currently introduces the product in the Lurpak butter commercial.Walk behind a tramp wearing no socks. Heels like turnips.6 February. A. asks for help with finding questions for a charity literary quiz. Suggest:Q. Who thought the Venerable Bede was a woman?A. Field Marshal Haig, who said so after musing for some time beside the Venerable Bede’s ...”

“... and I think she felt judged. A week later, she invited me back. Her house was tidy and she was wearing a pink blouse. A photograph of William in his burgundy blazer stood on the mantelpiece. His sister Chloe, then nineteen, had stopped by. Bear ran to the window and back again. Christine told me that Shannon – who had been heavily pregnant at William’s ...”