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“... A girl and three men are riding westward from London when a fifth rider joins them, a man in a red coat and dragoon’s hat. The year is 1736 and they are on horseback. Arriving at a Devonshire country inn, they tell the innkeeper and an intrusive parson about themselves and the purpose of their journey, but we suspect them of lying ...”

“... of the page. A left-wing journal here called the Tribute accepted an article he wrote about a London exhibition. Now 18, he was launched on a career for which he was but insecurely qualified. It was wartime, and he had seen very few foreign pictures; the National Gallery exposed only one Old Master a month. But, then as now, he was almost as interested in ...”

“... After that we get a bit of backstory, all about Lady Margaret being best pals with Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter and an abject little snob, plus several pages about how she wants to be a free spirit. I know this is 1865, and I know the author is 61, but this interlude allows some millennial light to seep in: Lady Margaret is ...”

“... is contemplating a feather duster (if that’s what it is). ‘I felt doomed to defeat,’ Sarah, Louise’s more academic sister, says in Drabble’s first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage (1963). ‘I felt all women were doomed. Louise thought she wasn’t but she was. It would get her in the end, some version of it.’ Is the ...”

“... it’s untethered to geography: ‘Wherever money is stolen from, it ends up in the same places: London, New York, Miami,’ Bullough writes. ‘And wherever it ends up, it is laundered in the same ways, through shell companies or other legal structures in the same handful of jurisdictions.’ Bullough’s core argument is that international criminal elites ...”

“... are gathered: beautiful, doomed, striving, Dionysiac youth (though McQueen was a plain-looking London boy, he was dusted in the eyes of his audience with the glitter of his creations and he liked to pose for the camera in different guises, one very alarming image showing him with a skull mask covering his lower face). His clothes stir uneasy and morbid ...”

“... less truthful book of the two. Conscious of himself as a creative genius, Davies was cultivated by London bookmen and clubmen as a natural in another sense again: as an untutored talent from the depths of the common people. Such phoenixes are, of course, a traditional and ancient thing, and the line taken in Shaw’s Introduction belongs to a long history of ...”

“... Indian tribe – allows kinds of complexity to develop which novels of middle-class life exclude. Louise Erdrich’s knowledge of the Chippewa Nation is coupled with a gift for characterisation which can make strange loves, conflicts and rages seem native to the realistic novel. One is also grateful for Jill Eisenstadt’s more straightforward ability to use ...”

“... her two sons; she had been making things like it for thirty years. She was born illegitimate in London in 1882; her mother had her fostered and she spent a few years in an orphanage before being sent to work on a farm in Canada. She came back to East London when she was 18, to live with her aunt Kate, a medium who held ...”

“... by learning Bengali and taking a course for governesses at the Home and Colonial College in London. What followed after her arrival in India reads like the plot of a Ruth Prawer Jhabvala novel. Finding it easy to dislike the memsahibs and missionaries she met in Calcutta, Ackroyd unexpectedly found it easy to dislike the Indians too. Acquiring premises ...”

“... pictures and only later became more scholarly. Their origins were varied: auction sales in London of pictures that left France after the Revolution; Napoleon’s loot, shown in the Louvre as his campaigns continued; the efforts of clubs of connoisseurs (e.g. the Burlington Fine Arts Club), whose exhibitions were eventually taken over by the Royal ...”

“... effects are those of charm and pathos. In the narrative’s front rank are a trio of characters. Louise is familial: she has husband, children and grandchildren. Regi is a social butterfly: she has gigolos even in her incontinent bedridden old age. Other than her childhood friend Louise, Regi sustains no attachments. Both ...”

“... which this is. The scene is Ireland. Minnie, the narrator, is summoned from a dreary life in London to go back after ten years’ absence to the house on the west coast where she has spent much of her childhood. It is the residence of Hugo Pierce, the celebrated novelist. But Hugo has just been found dead in the neighbouring woods, and Minnie is needed ...”

“... Claire-Louise​ Bennett is unpacking her library. Yes, she is. The books are not yet on the shelves. In fact, she doesn’t really have any shelves (she prefers to let the books pile up around her, a habit that gets her into trouble with at least one boorish lover). She has moved so often over the years that half her books are lost, having been packed into boxes and left in unremembered attics ...”

“... of early still lifes are apparently influenced by William Nicholson, who taught Hamnett at the London School of Art, though her paintings have none of his opulence and clarity. Rather, they are tightly cropped compositions in which objects and forms are flattened and simplified. Planes shift and tilt in compressed geometries; colours are muted and ...”