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“... new recruits inspired by the example of Khomeini himself. Hizbullah ‘had two progenitors’, David Hirst wrote in his seminal book on Lebanon, Beware of Small States (2010). ‘If Iran was one – with Syria, so to speak, as midwife – Israel was unquestionably the other. Iran furnished the model and the means, Syria the facilities, Israel – with its ...”

“... one, he captured a German colonel by thrusting a swagger stick into his back. He went into action wearing a cap modified to droop around his ears (he declined to wear a British-style steel helmet), a thick turtleneck sweater, highly polished cavalry boots and, draped around his neck, a seven-foot puce muffler knitted by his mother. He refused to use a ...”

“... be cut. Or a future government could choose to abolish them, as the radical free marketeers of David Lange’s Labour Party did when they came to power in New Zealand in the 1980s. Many British farmers support Brexit. Others fear it would destroy them. The National Farmers Union has come out against, arguing that without subsidies, most British farms would ...”

“... centre. When Saakashvili and his followers burst though the parliament doors in November he was wearing a flak jacket under his coat, but it was a red rose, not an AK-47, that he flourished in front of him. Shevardnadze, tired and cynical but still wise, could have used gunmen to stop him but chose not to. All the same, the danger from Saakashvili’s other ...”

“... Vicious as a cartoon character, leering menacingly in a swastika T-shirt; and McLaren himself, wearing a kilt, tartan jacket and ‘Cash from Chaos’ T-shirt.McLaren always seemed as crucial to the Sex Pistols as Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. (It was ...”

“... Arcite and Palamon. The pair are first found close to death on the battlefield, side by side, wearing the same arms. Taken prisoner, they become rivals for the love of Princess Emily. Their sworn brotherhood was a Chaucerian addition to Boccaccio’s original Theseid and it is hard not to read into it a reference to the kissing knights of ...”

“... Left, ‘had the novelist’s gift of telling lies’, and it seems that Roth had it too. Until David Bronsen established the facts in his German-language biography (an English translation is in progress), the record of Roth’s life was an evocative smudge, a rumour worthy of the shadowy border town in which he was born – a town about which, in different ...”

“... but modern fashion is closer to the mild rambling poems of the Georgian anthology: poets wearing their social conscience on their sleeves, versifying Coronation Street virtues and warmths, celebrating pop-life in Liverpool and the North-East, much as the Georgians celebrated life in rural Sussex and the Home Counties. The editors of Contemporary ...”

“... illegal in France. At university, she met Philippe Ernaux, got married, and had two boys, Eric and David. She returned to teaching, working for 23 years at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance, a sort of French Open University. The family moved to Cergy-Pontoise, a new town on the end of the RER A, on the north-west edge of Paris. Her father ...”

“... of the first beneficiaries, Macmillan paying the then record sum of £7000 for American rights to David Grieve in the (disappointed) hope of repeating the phenomenal success of her previous hit, Robert Elsmere. After the ending of the three-voller in 1894, and still more with the expansion of the market in the 1900s, the possibilities for large earnings from ...”

“... inside it.’ He also affected the manner of a prewar Polish dandy, kissing women’s hands, wearing make-up and so on, and played the tasteless plutocrat at a villa he built in Mallorca, where according to his English biographer, David Bellos, in Romain Gary: A Tall Story (2010), ‘he mostly ignored the people he ...”

“... learning really does seem deep enough to sustain him as he does his bathtub caterwauling, wearing his horrible hat, I don’t doubt, even as he writes. Pynchon, it isn’t worth for a millisecond forgetting, is a completely hilarious writer. Like all the very coolest of cultural icons, he couldn’t care less about shallow things like whether he’s ...”

“... like the pockets of comic relief in Shakespearean tragedy. It is far larger and more defining. In David Hawkes’s translation of The Dream, an achievement surpassing Scott Moncrieff’s or later English versions of Proust in the art of delivering one cultural world – a much stranger one – into another, not only is the wit no barrier to an Anglophone ...”

“... blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal. Then everything lands on our table in a ...”

“... the popular culture of the Fifties. In the pages of the Eagle, Dan Dare conquered the solar system wearing something that looked very much like an RAF uniform. His International Space Force was supposed to be a global outfit, but ‘Hank’ and ‘Pierre’ had only bit-parts; Sir Hubert called the shots. ‘Eee, I wish I’d stayed in Wigan,’ quavered ...”