“... It did the same the other week while I was reading the personal ads in Private Eye. In what we may as well call ‘the old days’ there used occasionally to be coded pleas from girls needing money for an abortion. Nowadays they’re advertising for everything, and requesting sums it’s less easy to unravel. In this issue of the Eye, for instance, there ...”

“... from 1985 onwards, of the ludicrously misconceived mission to Tehran by Robert McFarlane in May 1986, and of the use to which the profits of the sales were put, have been the subject of inquiries by the combined Senate and House Select Committee. The major questions were whether the President knew of the diversion of funds from the Iranian arms sales to ...”

“... Fields, he comments that the man on whom his character is based is a continent-hopping, devil-may-care Princeton graduate whose six languages include Khmer. ‘I graduated from Emerson College,’ Gray says, ‘and am still wrestling with American.’ What are actors, he wonders, compared to these dazzling ambassadors and foreign correspondents and ...”

“... old friends and (last year’s useful word) old frenemies – people you don’t like but may someday need. The conference attracts literary scholars from all over the world. Sipping espresso at an outdoor café, I met a Swiss critic of contemporary French fiction, on his first trip to the United States. He was shocked by American coffee, but calmly ...”

“... calls to mind, in politics, sport or the cycle of crime and punishment, but in fields where it may be found sublimated or turned into constructive channels, like science, education or entrepreneurship. The aim is less to catalogue its appearances, however, than to understand how the men and women of the 19th-century middle classes coped with it, by ...”

“... by the Dutch group ING with their demands for 1994 bonuses. As a result of the Barings case, we may be about to witness changes in the only commodities market which is dependably bullish, the trade in City slang. After the golden handshake and the golden parachute, it may be time to welcome the golden roadblock and say ...”

“... is certainly very mysterious.’ Fianna Fail was forced into setting up the tribunal in May 1991, when Desmond O’Malley, their partner in coalition, withdrew his support for a motion of confidence in the procedures then regulating the beef industry. There were two reasons O’Malley did this: one was the uproar in the Dail caused by a World in ...”

“... feminised in a spinsterish way, New England at its oldest. Then this: Have there been, we may ask, any successful efforts to escape from the genteel tradition, and to express something worth expressing behind its back? ... I might mention the humorists, of whom you here in California have had your share. The humorists, however, only half escape the ...”

“... star had subsequently waned, not least as a result of persecution by both French and Japanese. In May 1941, they established the Vietnam Independence League, or Viet Minh, as a front for activity in the new wartime context, yet a year before the August 1945 uprising they were still a small, persecuted group, ‘a minor irritant to the French authorities, and ...”

“... The old idols are not all they seemed and the vicarious sympathies of impassioned academics may have to be redirected from dockers and draymen to their long-suffering and long-silenced wives. When Thompson declared that it was time to rescue common people ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’, he had in mind ‘the poor stockinger, the ...”

“... But however much a modern travel book, like the prospectus or itinerary of a travel company, may pile on the picturesqueness, the colour, the scenery, the girls, the exotic food and drink, meaninglessness of another sort than that revealed to Mrs Moore soon takes over. In his quiet way Norman Lewis is an adept at suggesting the nature of this ...”

“... was voted through by a narrow majority. That is something, but when the Bill becomes law, as it may later this month, there will be at least 8000 asylum-seekers without benefit, according to the Refugee Council; many of them will be homeless. A policy that attempts to discourage future asylum-seekers by punishing those who are already here doesn’t make ...”

“... but a kind of apartheid routinely keeps them distinct. Towns, and the law administered from them, may generate ‘oases of Englishness’, but another Wales of poets, minstrels and prophets ‘apprenticed in ancient lore’ lies well beyond the English ken. Glyn Dŵr’s was a revolt of that Wales: a rising against law, in the name of lore. Fuelled and ...”

“... and black-clad, smoking cigarettes as they cluster in the dark S&M club of your body’, which may look like a hip and brave and humorous way of putting it, but actually is quite odd. Sinister, black-clad, cigarette-smoking? How can a woman writer in late 20th-century Manhattan be so narrow-minded and square? As Bank’s stories carry Jane Rosenal across ...”

“... that one day will begin to glow so that the spirit takes fire. She takes off her glasses . . . May I? . . . unpins her hair, hurls away her knitting bag, and leaving her employer outraged and weeping, sets off in search of love and life. It’s what always happened to Bette Davis. Why should it not happen to you? MISS PLUNKETT: Because, you verbose fool, I ...”