“... Lover’ a serious critique of Orientalism before the letter – to grab at any (camel) straw to get Ellington and Louis Armstrong into the ‘diversified’ current curriculum ahead of, say, the estimable and now canonical Langston Hughes.The musical flatulence of ‘Menelik’ might have been accepted by the more enlightened executives at RCA if ...”

“... don’t understand the job, and members of the public who are too quick to criticise. The ‘final straw’ for him was ‘the shameful sight of police officers running away from protesters, many of whom were just kids, in Whitehall during the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020’. He asked an online group made up of ten thousand retired and serving Met ...”

“... me sadly. I’d managed to loosen the nuts on the collapsed wheel – but the aperture for the jack was ominously soft and sticky with rust. The long-suffering little car received the vertical spear in its chassis, and stayed stoically earthbound. Now I have to say that I am already on very bad terms with the inanimate world. Even when making a cup of ...”

“... and his back is turned towards his wife of thirty years, as is hers to his. They are Mr and Mrs Jack Spratt in person, he tall and gaunt as a hanging judge and she, such a spreading, round little doughball. He is a miser, while she, she is a glutton, a solitary eater, most innocent of vices and yet the shadow or parodic vice of his, for he would like to eat ...”

“... and the city’s poorest citizens are notoriously bad: last year, according to the columnist Jack Shafer, when 700 blank rounds were fired in one of those neighbourhoods, nobody called the police. New Orleans’s homicide rate is ten times the national average. ‘Unless the government works mightily to reverse migration,’ Shafer wrote, ‘a positive ...”

“... guardsman of the 1880s; there was her Charlie Brown pitcher’s hat; and in June 1977 an octagonal straw table mat, tied on with a chiffon scarf and a bit of cardboard for the peak. She also went in for green eyeshades. Her skirts had a telescopic appearance as they had often been lengthened many times over by the simple expedient of sewing a strip of extra ...”