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“... Joseph, one of Thatcher’s closest Party allies, in the early 1970s. (One is reminded of the film Elizabeth, and of its heroine’s no less momentous and politically charged declaration: ‘I have become a Virgin.’) Joseph’s remark, Thatcher writes in her memoirs, acted on her as a revelation and a summons to action. The Conservative Party and ...”

“... in which they were written, we get to the very heart of loss. Happiness is rare in these stories. Elizabeth Jolley’s ‘Five Acre Virgin’ stands almost alone, dissolving into You-Can’t-Take-It-With-You amiability when slapdash Mother finds a husband for her ample sister. There are, on the other hand, only two stories – Cynthia Rich’s ‘My ...”

“... of South Bend, Indiana, who is green as a corn husk. Nor does the former Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, who, like Sanders, is far to the left of American mainstream voters and almost certainly toast after doing surprisingly badly in New Hampshire. And good old Joe Six-Pack? I actually like Biden. He’s an Irish-American pol of an earlier vintage ...”

“... from someone in his own town who couldn’t afford to eat. Food banks are extraordinarily new. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel of the Hungry Forties, Mary Barton, those who are ‘clemming’, or starving, just get used to it. And those who are not can barely imagine it. George Wilson in that novel goes to ask the mill-owner’s help for a friend who’s ...”

“... and designers, as if killing and dying were just an excuse for expensive art and theatricals. Elizabeth Banks, as the producer Effie Trinket, wears one improbable wig after another, and would win any prize available for the most extravagant false eyelashes. Stanley Tucci, as a television presenter, camps up every act of violence and political betrayal as ...”

“... Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Falcon (Anthony Mackie), War Machine (Don Cheadle), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). Between them, they can fly, mechanically calibrate distances, drop bombs, kickbox like maniacs, and shoot fire from their fingers, but they have a hard time winning the day, and they do burn a chunk of the hospital and kill some people by ...”

“... as well as the menu. An appearance of effortless sophistication is the middle-class ideal. Elizabeth David not only brightened postwar Britain with the flavours of the Mediterranean, she wrote in a way that reassured the large number of women and some men who were learning to cook for themselves that there was nothing demeaning about it. Her books are ...”

“... New Jersey, 1979 – or as starkly documentary as Walker Evans: National Barbershop, Bay Circle, Elizabeth, New Jersey, 1990. He is difficult to characterise. There is a formal quality to his work. The photographs are very much composed. There’s almost nothing of the glancing provisionality of the earlier generation of New York photographers, or the street ...”

“... resting passively on the body’s surface. A modern leader-of-the-nation’s lounge suit, Queen Elizabeth I’s pearl-embroidered dresses, the padded jackets and breeches of her courtiers – all these have more carapace-like, shape-imposing qualities than shape-taking ones. At the other extreme are flowing, liquid garments. Think of Nike adjusting her ...”

“... department is holding a press conference to report on its plans to guarantee the safety of Queen Elizabeth when she comes to visit. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen), a policeman, is not being heard when he speaks without a microphone, and this problem is remedied. The snag is that he needs to go to the bathroom and doesn’t turn off his mic. You can imagine ...”

“... Thank you for keeping still,’ Elizabeth Taylor says to Paul Newman at the end of the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Taylor’s character is thanking Newman for not saying anything when he hears her lying about being pregnant. But ‘Thank you for keeping still’ is also a good summary of Newman’s acting style, especially in his early films, when the main thing required of him was that he display his magnificent torso and his dazzling blue eyes for the audience to drink in their full manly beauty ...”

“... centre on a circuitous route to the stadium, purportedly for health and safety reasons. The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park’s website announces that the job of the London Stadium – as it is now known – is to bring in ‘new events and activities’. Sadiq Khan refused for months to meet Brady to discuss the problems at the stadium, before finally ...”

“... long ago by Kafka in ‘A Report to an Academy’, and more recently by J.M. Coetzee in his Elizabeth Costello stories. We can refuse to recognise the otherness of other animals by pretending they are like us, versions of us; and we can, it seems, understand their otherness only by a more refined use of the same method. But what constitutes the ...”

“... in watercolour. The best-known limner was Nicholas Hilliard, who held a monopoly given by Queen Elizabeth ‘to make portraits . . . of our body and person in small compass in limning only’. Kim Sloan explains in the catalogue (British Museum, £25) that ‘Hilliard would never have described himself as a “painter”, which he felt was a mechanical ...”

“... because it would be interesting to know what’s running through the mind of a Bernie Madoff or an Elizabeth Holmes on the first occasion they see the moral fork in the road, face the reality of their actions, and make the wrong choice. Or maybe what happens is an ethical blur, a rush and press of business, in which what feels like a temporary, fixable ...”