Many of us will have our first encounter with strange, long, unfamiliar terms in the books of Beatrix Potter – ‘superfluous’, ‘implored’ and ‘affronted’ were just some that intrigued me as a small person – because she deliberately included at least one difficult word in each story. It takes us back to rhythm and rhyme: even when we don’t understand

At their best, puns are a celebration of language’s slipperiness, its lack of control, its multiple meanings and its pleasures. Alexander Pope said that puns speak ‘twice as much by being split’.

It’s a similar story with the flap copy that Orwell wrote for the first edition of Animal Farm, published in 1945 by Secker & Warburg.40 In clear, measured tones, it tells us: It is the history of a revolution that went wrong – and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for each perversion of the original doctrine.

The screenwriter Craig Mazin, creator of the award-winning TV series Chernobyl, is big on the Hegelian dialectic. He talks about it as a way of approaching writing: ‘constant changing. Every scene begins with a truth, something happens inside of that scene. There is a new truth at the end and you begin, and you begin, and you begin.’

One of my favourite blurb descriptions of a character is of Count Fosco in The Woman in White: ‘who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison’. No need for a ‘sinister’ at all there. Another is on Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, which tells us that a young woman in a boarding house ‘pecks at spam and mashed potato by night’,

In an age when paper was expensive, they were often recycled, hence their nickname ‘bum fodder’. For further toilet-related fun, the word ‘bumf’, or ‘bumph’, is a shortened version of this.

Fast forward to the Renaissance, and Thomas More was taking quote whoredom to a new level, asking his friend Erasmus to ensure that his book Utopia ‘be handsomely set off with the highest of recommendations, if possible, from several people, both intellectuals and distinguished statesmen’.

the cover design for Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers is, very satisfyingly, half finished:

The best Hollywood pitches embody this idea of pairings or contrasts. Among my roll-call of honour would be I Am Legend: ‘The last man on earth is not alone’; The Social Network: ‘You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies’; and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: ‘One man’s struggle to take it easy.’