You don't get what it says on the tin. They don't fly, they're not Russian and they're not brothers. And their line of patter is a little less dense than Dostoevsky's: "We're working without a net tonight." "We didn't invite her." Boom-boom, as Basil Brush used to say.

Ever since I founded The Idler in 1993, I've been fascinated by the idea of small business and enterprise as an alternative to the slow strangulation of the nine-to-five. My embrace of entrepreneurialism has led to accusations of hypocrisy from my socialist critics. How can you say you're an idler while you also run a business? You seem to be a little bit busy for someone who proclaims himself to be an idler. And how can you be an anti-capitalist and also sell T-shirts?

Michael Holroyd is one of our best known writers, yet one of the most mysterious. His scholarly, entertaining biographies – from Lytton Strachey in 1967 to a group portrait of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their families in 2009 – have made him famous for 40 years. But in his Lives, Holroyd is classically invisible, appearing only as an ironic smile, like the Cheshire Cat.

The post-independence generation of Africans, who needed an intellectual anchor to the political sovereignty the colonialists formally relinquished to them in the 1950s and '60s, will be forever grateful to the British historian Basil Davidson.