Why, for example, does he insist on serving up huge gristly chunks of talk that bear no resemblance to human conversation?
Never pretentious, they say he even insisted on serving small hot dogs as appetizers at fancy parties, because he thought that was what guests liked to eat.
They insisted on serving wine in extremely fine crystal; sometimes he demanded to use a jelly jar, prophylactically.
He saw Crittenden as a cornerstone of his administration, offering him the crucial seat of Secretary of State, but Crittenden insisted on serving out the Governorship of Kentucky to which he had just been elected.
Marion has approached Robert for help because she needs the advice, she says, of "someone of my own sort" - and, indeed, what draws him so swiftly and so surely on to her side are the little signals of decency he identifies in her and her mother: their elegant, if shabby, furniture; the fact that they insist on serving "admirable" sherry despite being forced into other economies.
The sixteenth-century Mogul emperor Akbar called it "the water of immortality," and insisted on serving it at court.
But Ayers, who has young children, had insisted on serving temporarily, which frustrated Trump, who had wanted a replacement to stay on through 2020.
She insisted on serving and clearing, as she says she does at the dinner parties she often throws for 20 or more guests.
The Egyptian army, which, unlike Tunisia's politics-shy military, stepped in last winter to oversee the transition, has insisted on serving as an executive branch, wielding much the same sweeping powers as did Mr Mubarak.
Lafayette, who had insisted on serving without pay in the Continental Army, continued to support America from France, spending $200,000 of his own money to send clothing and arms to the Americans and to the French troops fighting here.
