“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from among the large volume of information that the police received: Jamie Acourt, Neil Acourt, David Norris and Gary Dobson. The names came from unreliable sources – an ex-girlfriend, youths with grudges against them. All four had been suspects in connection with previous acts of racial violence. Despite a barrage of teenage estate gossip with all the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with the long red streamers of Nazidom’ (at St Anton, he noticed, even the station dog was wearing a swastika). The train finally arrived in Vienna, where troops marched down the Ringstrasse as German planes flew in formation overhead. Hitler’s portrait was displayed in all the shop windows on Kärntnerstrasse, ‘the Bond Street of Vienna’, and ...”

“... they wanted more. ‘The Muslims just hate us for our love of freedom,’ said a woman from Iowa wearing a cloth elephant on her head. ‘They don’t have any culture and they hate us for having a great one. And they hate the Bible.’ ‘Really?’ I said. ‘The Iraqis had a culture for thousands of years before Jesus was born.’ ‘What you ...”

“... together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.’ Stryker stood at the podium wearing what she calls ‘genderfuck drag’: combat boots, threadbare Levi 501s over a black lace bodysuit, a shredded Transgender Nation T-shirt with the neck and sleeves cut out, a pink triangle, quartz crystal pendant, grunge metal jewellery, and a six inch ...”