Dorothy Sayers would surely have turned in her grave if she could have heard, as I did a few months ago, a BBC announcer introducing a dramatization of her story Gaudy Night by a few remarks about the heroine, Harriet Vane, and her ‘cohort’, Lord Peter Wimsey. Or perhaps she would have been convulsed with laughter at the absurd contrast between Lord Peter in his sober Savile Row suit and the cohorts in Byron's well-known lines:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.