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“... and degraded specimens of his day. They would be surrounded by suitably deferential courtiers wearing gold pins in the shape of bamboo – ‘Milasi’ means ‘bamboo’. Mdala believed that the British would not buy his plan unless it was backed up by stacks of historical evidence proving the legitimacy of the Milasi and their age-old right to rule. In ...”

“... light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role I was ...”

“... Ican list​ a hundred things David Foster Wallace should have written before he wrote a book about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers ...”

“... out of line. Enter Muhammad Ali, who over the next few years was to change the face of boxing. David Remnick’s book in fact concentrates on the two astonishing fights Ali had with Liston (Ali won the title in the first and defended it successfully in the second), and on the relationship between Ali, Liston and Patterson. For Remnick, as for most ...”

“... in a novel by P.G. Wodehouse’ but is in fact a ‘bachelor with intellectual tastes’, wearing ‘enormous, totally non-conducting tortoise-shell glasses’ and accompanied by ‘a friend, inevitably called Michael, who said not a single word and contented himself with selections from his repertoire of ravishing smiles, which ranged from a ...”

“... disasters, Benedict Cumberbatch as Smiley’s diligent gofer, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, David Dencik, Ciarán Hinds as high-ups in British intelligence, all candidates for the ultimately declared position of mole – and the director’s elegant hand is everywhere. Tomas Alfredson is best known for his bleak vampire movie Let the Right One In, and ...”

“... other in the complement of pages, page order, colour, and occasionally the wording’ – so says David Bindman in his introduction to William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books (Thames and Hudson, 480 pp., £39.95, 30 October, 0 500 51014 8). Obviously not many such books could be printed, which accounts for their extreme rarity, but Blake thought his ...”

“... the twisted naked bodies of the prisoners. When I first saw the notorious photograph of a prisoner wearing a black hood, electric wires attached to his limbs as he stood on a box in a ridiculous theatrical pose, my reaction was that this must be a piece of performance art. The positions and costumes of the prisoners suggest a theatrical staging, a tableau ...”

“... and social change. Recently a number of younger historians – Kathleen Birk, Keith Neilson, and David French in his first book British Economic and Strategic Planning 1905-1915 – have begun to consider some of the key questions of finance and economics. But until now nobody has tried to put all this specialist work together. The last oeuvre de synthèse ...”

“... his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more to Harpers & Queen. The fashion bubble of Sixties London was not quite the fourth dynasty or the historical watershed of the Crimean War. What was of interest ...”

“... the engine running and he says: ‘Where does a chap park his charabanc in these parts?’ He was wearing tight beige trousers the like of which I don’t think the street had ever seen. I said I wouldn’t leave the keys in the car. At one point Fiona mentioned there was a bit of crab in the starter and he went into major melodrama, rushing to the door ...”

“... out’. But Ron, the younger twin? There he was, large as life, out and about in his own manor, wearing ‘slacks and an open-necked shirt’. He didn’t have a tie! That was the moment. The tickle of ice on the spine. Put it down to executive stress, the ravages of Stemetil, Largactil, Reserpine. These were anxious times: pharmacological excesses joining ...”

“... right words, I will never know, because he knows what I do not, how to keep things to himself. David Sedaris had invited me to read alongside him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says that he feels the pump and it’s ...”

“... of what’s past, present, or to come: insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal’. David Smith finds most of this description eminently applicable to H.G. Wells (whom he intensely admires) and he adopts its final two words as a subtitle for his biography. What sense Shakespeare attached to them is doubtful. Johnson suggests ‘likely to die in ...”

“... Lawyers these days doubtless read John Mortimer, and dons read the new university wits like David Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper ...”