“... how to run a college.’ By late April he was installed in Venice, ‘by the soap-smooth stone posts where San Vio/meets with il Canal Grande’ (Canto LXXVI). From there he writes back to his ‘Benign & Reverend Parent’, in answer to an inquiry into the state of his finances: ‘I am by no means sure it would not be pleasanter to starve the body ...”

“... fluffysdoggingqueen was an idiot with badly dyed roots, terrible halitosis and at least three stone overweight. In the world of lay-bys and car parks she was a celebrity, a star. He wouldn’t cross the road to see her buggered by an Irish builder on the bonnet of a BMW one more time. Meanwhile a gay man like Sam, who runs a cheese shop in the town, can ...”

“... Palestinian intifada: ‘The natives: for many years … they asked for bread, and we gave them a stone. Now they have found a use for these stones; we are getting them back – thrown. Thrown at trains, at police, at white men’s cars.’ Note the ‘we’. By her own analysis, Gordimer has always been a legitimate target. Paul Bannerman, the central ...”

“... Alliance says that her motto is ‘cut, kill, dig and drill’ and that she lives ‘in the Stone Age of wildlife management, and is very opposed to utilising accepted science’. For many voters, that’s ample reason to see her as a folk hero. She has nicely positioned herself for national consumption as the enemy of the effete and over-sophisticated ...”

“... medical transition, for example, lasted two years, involving 25 general anaesthetics, a ten-stone weight gain, thromboses, more than one major haemorrhage, fistula and infections. She barely survived, though none of this has stopped her from going on to lead one of the most effective campaigning lives as a transsexual woman. In 1931, Lili Elbe died ...”

“... Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and Evil.’ Harry Furniss wrote that ‘Lady Wilde, had she been cleaned up and plainly and rationally dressed, would have made a remarkably fine model of the Grand Dame, but with all her paint and tinsel and tawdry tragedy-queen get-up she was a walking burlesque of ...”

“... seducing upper-class women; and he was an unrivalled showman on the podium. His nickname, ‘Flash Harry’, was a very different soubriquet from Henry Wood’s ‘Old Timber’: a double-edged acknowledgment, not only of his celebrity, but also of what his critics regarded as his limitations. It took Sargent seven years to assert his dominance over the ...”

“... French penal colony for the similarly ailing Jean Genet: ‘I envisaged bringing him its earth and stone.’ As with Bowles, at the time of this jaunt Genet was dying, refusing pain medication in order to finish Un Captif amoureux. She says that in his early work Genet painted earthly hell-holes as his own form of secular redemption, and that when they ...”

“... close to a recitation of a catechism, simply asking, for example, ‘how it can be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being.’ But where all his powers were concentrated, Agee could build to more sustained recognitions; as in the intense rendering of the plain faces of a man and a woman: The young man’s eyes had the opal ...”

“... Caine is singled out for praise as ‘dismissive of establishments wherever he found them’ – Harry Palmer ‘came to epitomise the decline of deference’. (Peter Hitchens, in contrast, uses the framework of national identity in The Abolition of Britain, published in 1999, to issue a diatribe against the ‘social revolution’ – the disappearance of ...”

“... of Wren, ‘the greatest English architect’, now taken for granted, was fledged. The architect Harry Goodhart-Rendel was right: ‘Practically all Englishmen and practically no foreigners’ believe that Wren was a great architect. As if to prove it, the English dotards and their epigones would, amazingly, still be at it, all red brick and ...”

“... Union flag mask, Park View recently hosted a visit from the Royal College of Defence Studies and a Harry Potter Trivia Evening; it had a Christmas card competition, and one girl was picked to meet Prince William. The school leadership is new, the trust that oversees the running of the school has a new name and the school itself will shortly get a new name ...”

“... facts’ are paramilitary crimes, from armed robberies to punishment beatings. Harry McCartan, a serial joy-rider whose ankles the IRA had smashed with hammers 18 months before, was found crucified and semi-conscious on 2 November 2002. He was taken to hospital with his hands still impaled on the fence he had been nailed to. The beating he ...”

“... A scientific law will accurately predict an outcome, given certain initial conditions: where a stone will land if launched with a certain force at a certain angle; the colour of your unborn child’s eyes. But there is no other Earth on which to run experiments. So climate scientists build models using known physical laws, then test and improve them with ...”

“... And certainly, the un-Tolkien-like tweeness of J.K. Rowling’s coinages doesn’t help with Harry Potter.3 But both Ursula le Guin (in her great Earthsea trilogy, 1968-73) and Philip Pullman (in his trilogy, His Dark Materials, 1995-2000) developed evocative and consistent naming systems for their imagined worlds without going on and on about it. Of ...”