“... spending programmes. Another hint of vitality is the traffic. Cars, carts, trucks and yellow and white Corolla taxis swarm past bearded old men on three-speed bicycles. They slow down at roundabouts and come to a halt near the highest walls for a hundred miles. Rising above the parapet, a concrete fortress casts its shadow over the soldiers outside. A taxi ...”

“... gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy ...”

“... escape, Friar Balbi, but wins over the reader by buttonholing him directly. In The Casanova Fable William Gerhardie and Hugh Kingsmill throw away all these possibilities by transposing the story into the third person, and furthermore adopt a disapproving narrative voice; their odd little book is eventually going to turn into a mock-judicial arraignment of the ...”

“... to harp on in a biography of an artist who expressed his genius almost exclusively in black and white. Ineptitude is something Ms Benkovitz carries to a pitch where it seems inspired. It must be a Muse of Ineptitude who directs her towards artists who least abide literal-minded question: Firbank, of whom she published a biography and a bibliography in the ...”

“... already had a couple of unsettling epiphanies this soccer year. Out of habit, I battled my way to White Hart Lane on the first day of the season, expecting to savour the ten-year-old’s sensations I’ve been savouring for thirty years: the verdant sward, the August sun, the eager, shirt-sleeved throng and, best of all, the certain knowledge that my ...”

“... of Auberon Waugh. Under the guise of satire, humour scourges rich and poor, weak and powerful, white and black, reactionary and progressive, young and aged alike, with an even-handed injustice. It is immaterial that some are armoured and others defenceless. The joke is all, the sicker the better. And the fulcrum of the balance is a middle-class, middlebrow ...”

“... Muir. The Beckinsales – one native to the north Cots-wolds and the other to the Vale of the White Horse – present what is for them the English heartland. Richard Muir, nostalgic for the Nidderdale hamlet of Birtwhistle, offers his view of the evolving English village. Both books communicate the enjoyment that their authors have had in compiling ...”

“... cases that symptomatised the loosened sexual mores adopted by certain segments of society. White-collar felonies were supplemented by what might be called dinner-jacket offences. Sir Charles Dilke was undone by the mendacious accusations of Virginia Crawford, and Parnell by his liaison with Kitty O’Shea. And then there was the Marlborough House ...”

“... words. Fergusson wants the great lexicographer to be fed, among many other oatmeal-rich dishes, ‘white and bloody puddins routh,/To gar the Doctor skirl, O Drouth!’ Here Watson’s line-by-line glossary will assist the uninitiated, who may feel that they have come a long way from the Latinate English of ‘the frost subdu’d, / Gradual, resolves into a ...”

“... art. Reading Gaston, I was reminded repeatedly of paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Waterhouse. Pater’s interest in these works might help us to understand their appeal not only to his contemporaries, but to audiences today. Queen Margaret of Navarre is first mentioned in the novel with a Greek quotation that links her to Homer’s ...”

“... standard-issue purple balaclava and a banana taped to his hairy stomach. He stands in front of the white wall of an art gallery; a label to his left reads ‘The Impossible Dream of a Pubic Fruit’ and an audience looks up at his giant grey legs. The image is one of five thousand that make up the digital artist Beeple’s collage Everydays: The First 5000 ...”

“... extracts from colonial and 19th-century American ‘captivity narratives’: that is, accounts by white women of their abduction by Native American tribes. The extracts’ theme is the deaths of children and the gentleness of mothers, on which Mlinko comments: ‘Gentleness (I know)/is learned. And unlearned also.’ Not unlearned fast enough when the Quahadi ...”

“... in a Land Rover up Firle Beacon for an ‘airing’, or take her to lunch at the White Hart in Lewes or the Cavendish Hotel in Eastbourne. I would sometimes see this curious couple on the farm track – receiving a genial acknowledgment from Logan and a look of puzzlement from the tiny, swathed figure beside him, only just able to see out of ...”

“... quest for food. Between 1918 and 1920, the Pavlovs lost their youngest son Vsevolod to the White Army in the civil war (after the Red victory he fled to Constantinople), and their middle son Viktor to typhus, contracted on his way to join the Whites. Pavlov’s brother Sergei died in 1919. His relatives and neighbours succumbed to hunger, disease and ...”

“... as he may have been, Bush hasn’t been oblivious of his father. When he was a student at Yale, William Sloane Coffin, the theologian who was taken to court for leading protests against the draft during the Vietnam war, told Bush that his father had lost his campaign to become a Texas senator in 1964 to ‘a better man’: Ralph Yarborough, unlike Bush ...”