“... synonyms every week. It was with characteristic British reserve, though, that Lieutenant-Colonel David Morgan, Commandant of the 1st Battalion of the Seventh Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Riders, set about straightening things out. The Gurkhas are the British soldiers whom, in an ugly slur, Garcia Marquez accused of committing almost unprintable ...”

“... which plainly made Russia a potential antagonist. Shortly after the defeat of Napoleon, the young Grand Duke Nicholas had come to England. Lady Charlotte Campbell found him ‘devilish handsome’, while others, less frivolously, thought that he might one day put Russia on the Western path of enlightenment. Alas, when Nicholas succeeded as tsar in 1825, he ...”

“... Europe, would come to the Zam Zam, sometimes for the martinis but usually to be thrown out. When David Letterman came to town to do a week of shows his advance people phoned Bruno to see if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s ...”

“... using it, probably fewer than in some other sports. Just before the Tour began, the British rider David Millar – very popular in France, almost unknown in Britain – confessed to taking EPO. He has now been stripped of his world time-trial title. This is the first time since 1978 that no British rider has taken part in the Tour. Suspicions about Armstrong ...”

“... him ‘perpetually resilient, flexible, fertile in device and ready for accommodation within the grand circle of the negotiable’. The key to his politics lay in his mastery of legal skills. He demonstrated ‘the lawyer’s ineluctable concern with the correctness of form and formulae, with legal effect rather than with moral stances or satisfactions ...”

“... the élite Victorian mind at a lower archaeological level than that of the pre-eminent sage: its grand aim is to bring under bibliographic control the principal Victorian framers of opinion – namely, the periodicals. Higher journalism, particularly the slow-rhythmed quarterlies and monthlies, were taken by Houghton as the medium in which Victorian ideas ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... to spare description of physical actions and enigmatic moments. Rather than returning to the grand historical reconstructions of Underworld or Libra (1989) – to which readers might uncharitably compare Falling Man’s apparent smallness – it seems that in Falling Man DeLillo has produced a revision of an influential ‘small’ book he delivered ...”

“... were allotted to elected deputies of the people.Chief Pleas has consistently been suspicious of grand plans for reform. This is because tax increases would fall mainly on inhabited property, given tenants’ centuries-old opposition to a bureaucracy capable of administering an inquisitorial income tax. Tenant resistance on grounds of cost delayed all the ...”

“... Harpo and Gummo. Minnie came along for the ride and, as their business manager, felt sufficiently grand to rename herself Minnie Palmer. On a gig one night in Waukegan, Illinois – fabled town: was it not the Waukegan conservatory that taught Jack Benny the violin? – the brothers looked past the footlights and saw at the piano, inexplicably, the wandering ...”

“... the consolations of an essential self. There never was such a thing, for Barthes any more than for David Hume, and we are doubtless all the better for it. What looks like a loss is actually a liberation. Unity is an illusion, and consistency is more a vice than a virtue. Postmodernism is full of personality cults, but they know themselves to be ...”

“... offstage, and a chorus (of local women) speaking blindly of freedom for the ‘seed of Atreus’. David Kovacs, another recent translator of Euripides’ Orestes, tells us the play was ‘immensely popular in antiquity’, but this fact only increases his puzzlement, which he shares with Carson. ‘This most baffling play,’ Kovacs says, ‘has a plot that ...”

“... own version of what the project entailed. Not that Pagden’s account is itself cartoonish; the grand architecture of his argument is finely ornamented with nuance and qualification. Indeed, far from exaggerating the novelty of his cosmopolitan Enlightenment, Pagden locates its roots in Europe’s classical inheritance, or to be more exact, in the interplay ...”

“... satire and sentiment’. The shape of that sentiment became increasingly clear. In a eulogy for David Foster Wallace, who killed himself in 2008, Saunders explained his friend’s accomplishment in terms that made it hard not to imagine he was also describing his own aspirations: ‘Something about the prose itself was inducing a special variety of openness ...”

“... boring Arsenal. Even when they won, they were losers.In 1989, while coaching Monaco, Wenger met David Dein, the Arsenal vice chairman. Wenger went to an Arsenal match and after the game shared a cigarette with a friend of Barbara Dein, David’s wife. He was invited to their house in Totteridge, North London, for supper ...”