“... of. Perhaps that’s because he’s kept the press on their guard with his proven readiness to sue for libel (there was a famous episode in Northern Ireland some years ago involving a chocolate eclair). McCartney states that the majority of Unionists will vote No to ‘delegates of armed terrorists serving both in the assembly and government’. For ...”

“... as opposed to church bells, the cries of children playing outside, or the purring of a large, fat black and white cat? One sound is as likely and evocative as another, if you must import sound at all into a work which – unlike Picasso’s Guernica, or Edvard Munch’s The Scream – offers no tangible encouragement to the viewer to supply it. But at least ...”

“... belief that Germany was going to lose. So why did Germans not rise up and force the regime to sue for peace? Towards the end of the First World War, recognition that the war was lost led senior generals to the negotiating table. Not so in 1944-45. Why not? Most wars between states in the modern age, according to Ian Kershaw, end with an agreed peace as ...”

“... female flesh can be difficult to look at, but these were monochrome portrait heads, etched in hard black line. Did I find them cruel? I’m not sure. I certainly thought they were ugly. Decades later, after I had learned a bit about the process of etching, I became preoccupied by these strange, twisted, touching works, made in the last thirty years of ...”

“... after facing a torrent of racist abuse.) On the second morning, I spoke to a man wearing a black T-shirt with an image of a Crusader and the slogan ‘For England’. He was reluctant to speak to a journalist (‘We hate you’) but relented when I promised not to use his name. (‘I’ll sue you if you do. I’ll go ...”

“... had longish hair and wore an outfit that spoke of bohemian credentials: light-coloured trousers, a black frock coat, brightly coloured waistcoats with a white silk cravat held with an amethyst pin and always carrying lavender gloves.’ ‘It is at the Grosvenor Gallery,’ Wilde wrote in 1879, ‘that we are enabled to see the highest development of the ...”

“... England’.22 January. Watching Footballers’ Wives I see among the production credits the name Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock chimed. I’ve never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the ...”

“... of racist attacks; or they have suffered accidents while in transit or at work, mostly in the black economy. In Driven to Desperate Measures, Harmit Athwal has gathered information from press reports and from interviews with asylum seekers and refugees, NGOs, charities and social workers. Her research makes clear that Britain, far from being somewhere to ...”

“... exotic in the New Yorker’s ascetic halls. She sported a rose in her left lapel, and carried a black and white skunk bag she was ‘inhumanly fond of’. No woman, she said, should wear a bra that cost less than $50 at Saks. Maeve Brennan photographed by Karl Bissinger in 1948 There are plenty of photographs of Brennan, but the one I remember is Karl ...”

“... twenty years, according to the Public Lending Right statistics, the nation’s favourite reading. Sue Townsend said of Diana that she was ‘a fatal non-reader’. She didn’t know the end of her own story. She enjoyed only the romances of Barbara Cartland. I’m far too snobbish to have read one, but I assume they are stories in which a wedding takes place ...”

“... his tarnished history seems more winsome than the eternally recommenced affairs of the J.R. and Sue Ellen of the West Riding). J.I.M. Stewart’s An Open Prison is splendidly paced, and ends absolutely without remainder. This is not dry-stonewalling, but the most skilled dressing of an elaborate façade, which leaves no sign of any nook or cranny, let alone ...”

“... of professional etiquette to readers of the diary, whereupon Tomalin had no alternative but to sue. To Waugh’s disappointment, Ingrams was minded to accept an out of court settlement. Waugh made vigorous attempts to inflame the situation, giving it ‘a good wiggle’ with a number of articles in the Spectator which he hoped would lead to a charge of ...”

“... and wig, the short and bald Stanford became the portly overbearing blackmailer and user of black magic Hector Bartlett, who’s repeatedly described by the heroine of A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) as a pisseur de copie. Stanford also underpins the narrator’s bisexual bad novelist boyfriend in Loitering with Intent (1981), whose prose is described ...”

“... the right-wing mobs carry weapons and beat people up, that’s a whole different category. A young black man from the bar, overhearing us, stepped up and joined forces with Robert: ‘The leftist mob, they’re bad!’It was a peculiar evening, and I suspect the weirdness of it could be matched anywhere in the US today. Why is it so easy to talk to people like ...”

“... than £1300 a month by the state to accommodate Ruby in a single bedroom with a leaking roof and black mould creeping down the walls. He has now retired to Italy, where he runs a yachting association and posts on Facebook about his golf handicap.‘I want to shame him so badly,’ Ruby told me. ‘I want to harass him, I want to make his life ...”