“... tales. He recovered but, it was said, donned the hair-shirt which he was still wearing when he died in 1695. The tales which made him famous and brought such trouble from the authorities and his conscience were published between 1665 and (despite his promise to be good) 1685. With the odd exception, they were purloined from venerable ...”

“... made a sensation of Bacall. It’s in the class of an Astaire musical. ‘Slim’ in the film was wearing clothes based on the ones Slim wore in life, and ‘Steve’, her name for Harry in the film, was what the real Slim called Howard. There was a coy home movie playing out within the melodrama on screen, with Walter Brennan, Marcel Dalio and Hoagy ...”

“... Good now extends this fine line of wit even further: Here is a list of the people that Andrew and David have hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William ...”

“... love scene? The question remains under-explored, despite Richard Smith’s assertion that David Bowie and Mick Jagger in their gender-ambivalent days ‘caused more than a few confusing erections’. Sadly he doesn’t give sources. There are more unanswered questions. If there is indeed some link between homosexuality and cross-dressing, what is ...”

“... known for the Watchmen comics, explained that the idea belonged to his co-author and illustrator David Lloyd. ‘We shouldn’t burn the chap every November 5th,’ Lloyd wrote to Moore, ‘but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!’ Moore says two thoughts occurred to him when he read this. ‘Dave was obviously a lot less sane than I hitherto ...”

“... it, archly). When another woman, Odette Keun, invited him to her hotel room and he found her wearing only ‘a flimsy wrap and an aroma of jasmine’ he took up with her too, although she came to infuriate him. Then there was a year or so with Elizabeth von Arnim, and a woman who tried to kill herself in front of him, and a few (not ...”

“... in the company of a boy, smaller and younger than ourselves, a fragile boy with ginger hair called David. I think we thought of him as ‘our boy’. We bossed him. Occasionally, when he didn’t walk straight or carry our bags or speak when we wanted him to, we’d slap him or hit his hands with a ruler. We had to pass through fields to get to school, with ...”

“... Order of the Brown Nose would stumble before long on an obsequious supplementary question from David Evans, one of the very first Tories to make a million out of privatisation (in his case from rubbish collection). Again and again, at Prime Minister’s Question Time, the blustering MP for Welwyn and Hatfield would rise to sing the praises of his hero in ...”

“... got 17.4 per cent of the vote.On 29 October, the French Senate passed an amendment banning ‘the wearing of religious symbols’ by adults accompanying children on school trips. The amendment is unlikely to pass the lower house. During the debate, Jean-Louis Masson, an independent senator from Moselle, likened veiled women to ‘witches’. ‘If they’re ...”

“... because I was given Twin Peaks Season One on DVD for Christmas. For those who’ve never seen David Lynch and Mark Frost’s pioneering TV series of the early 1990s, Twin Peaks is a small town in Washington, five miles south of the Canadian border, 12 miles west of the state line. Laura Palmer, the high school homecoming queen, has been murdered. Agent ...”

“... George Michael (‘breaking a six-year silence’). Guest editors have included Damien Hirst and David Bailey – Big Issue chic. The ads say something, too: Levis, Sony, Calvin Klein, Bacardi; British Nuclear Fuels, a contentious issue in the office, soon pulled; some of the best clients are Rizla and Drum Tobacco, which says something else. They also now ...”

“... All this makes it easy to refuse calls for an inquiry, just as it was after 7 July. The joke is wearing thin. Blair’s second running gag has been to portray himself as a man with profound convictions about the need for justice in Palestine – yo – and to speak openly of his wish to settle a conflict he’s driven further into the blood and mire than ...”

“... lovely Ariane Deume, née Ariane Cassandre Corisande d’Auble, ‘very top-drawer in Geneva’ as David Coward nicely renders ‘ce qui se fait de mieux à Genève’. The two horses suggest Solal hopes to abduct the girl right now, but he has other tricks up his sleeve, in spite of his bare breast. He appears to be thinking of killing himself, and he dons an ...”

“... a gay kid working his way out of the closet. When he was eventually arrested by the police he was wearing a striped top he’d stolen from the house of the actor Orlando Bloom. And that’s what they did: after days of shopping or doing pilates, hanging out on MySpace, texting or oh-my-god-ing on their iPhones, studying Google Maps or celebrity websites to ...”

“... and drainage, heating, electricity, telephone cables. It also occurred to him that he ought to be wearing a hard hat, as the rock-faces hadn’t been secured with concrete.’ These sensible observations, made while running through the dark in pursuit of a man who likes to drink pigeons’ blood, are fairly typical of the current wave of Nordic crime ...”