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“... and like many young women of her class in Ireland, she was already well used to life in London when in 1898 she enrolled at the Slade to study painting. For the first half of her long life, Gray knew everybody. At the Slade she met Wyndham Lewis, and soon made friends with the potter Bernard Leach, the explorer Henry Savage Landor and the sculptor ...”

“... At the end of his stay in Paris, Wedekind remembered ‘Alice, Rachel, Germaine, Marie Louise, Raymonde, Madeleine, Lucienne and my little Christ child’, and commended them to the care of Gaston Fero, who was seeing him off on the train to London. He forgot to mention ‘the little blonde piglet’ (perhaps the ...”

“... One of their assailants was said to have looked like Rosenblum. A few days later he was in London, with plenty of money to splash around. He took rooms in Lambeth, refreshed his wardrobe and found work as an art dealer with Wilfrid Voynich, a one-time Polish-Lithuanian revolutionary who had escaped from Siberia in 1890. Voynich would later open an ...”

“... and friends keep moving around. Travel is permitted on designated routes, though passing through London or what’s left of it (‘Unfortunate destruction’, a visiting official admits, ‘yet necessary’) involves prolonged interrogation. Every country walk or visit to the beach carries a risk; each passer-by is potentially an enemy. In the most ...”

“... essay by eight contemporary artists: Elaine de Kooning, Rosalyn Drexler, Marjorie Strider, Louise Nevelson, Lynda Benglis, Eleanor Antin, Rosemarie Castoro and Suzi Gablik. These ran the gamut from tentative support for Nochlin’s argument to outright rejection of the category ‘woman artist’. Nevelson’s blunt riposte to the categorisation of ...”

“... passage with the Préfet and our ambassador Duff Cooper about the latter’s relations with Madame Louise de Vilmorin. The fourth pays tribute to Bertrand Russell, a great Whig lord like himself and like him a monster of intelligence. In the fifth we are with the Agricultural Research Council, only to be told of an unusual and simple cure for eczema practised ...”

“... and uncaring worldly mother. The most vivid character and best lay in the story is not the writer Louise de Vilmorin who questioned the Baron about circumcision while running her fingers through his pubic hair, but Charley Brighton, née Charlotte Bouquet, the daughter of a hotel doorman in Grenoble: ‘I spotted this piece of skirt strolling along the ...”

“... to glorify Napoleon I’s conquests) on 16 May. Women were very active during the Commune. Louise Michel, a schoolteacher, medical worker and anarchist, treated those injured on the barricades and joined the National Guard. Elisabeth Dmitrieff, the daughter of a tsarist official, was a co-founder of the Women’s Union. She was also representative of ...”

“... for a while a close associate of the militant revolutionary Blanqui; in 1880, he met Karl Marx in London, as well as Mill and Herbert Spencer; and in New York he met General Grant, though no one seems to know what they talked about. Clemenceau, who was never either clément nor sot, was not just a Tiger – as the journalists called him – but an ...”

“... propaganda against the Sinhalese. Nothing my wife, who is Sinhalese and works for BBC News in London, said could impinge on this belief. There have been demonstrations outside Bush House and White City by both Sinhalese and Tamil protesters, each insisting that the BBC is biased against them. Given that it is the only news broadcaster which keeps a ...”

“... as a Polish émigré confessional poet. Of Mitchell and Laura, antique dealers from North London, boring, rather foodie, with an interest in old guns. The swimming pool, Levy warns us, is ‘more like a pond’ than pools usually look like in shiny brochures. But still, we think we understand what we’re seeing: the villa, the pool, the white ...”

“... At the Paris Salon​ of 1822, the young French artist Adrienne-Marie-Louise Grandpierre-Deverzy exhibited The Studio of Abel de Pujol, a painting of her teacher’s workshop. More than a dozen female trainees are shown going about their business. A little group looks over de Pujol’s shoulder as he critiques a sketch; others make copies from paintings selected for their improving moral content; in the background, two women are sketching from a ringleted, clothed female model, concentrating on getting the folds of the drapery right ...”

“... morte que changée (‘I rather break than bend’) as her personal motto. After moving from London to Heidelberg on her marriage to Frederick in 1613, the 16-year-old Elizabeth was observed by German courtiers returning from a hunt, crossbow in hand, having ‘chased the deer after such a fashion that it was marvelled at and in this country even seemed ...”

“... the realm of fairground display, or its modern equivalent. There is no movement to reclassify the London Dungeon or Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors as ‘museums’; while, for all the virtual reality of its ‘Blitz Experience’, the Imperial War Museum takes care not to be a sideshow of gore and guts. In Britain, debates about the nature of the ...”

“... execution and discounted the mature deliberation with which she made her choices. (The Bishop of London, for example, called this middle-aged professional administrator a ‘poor, defenceless English girl’.) In this respect she has written a revisionist book, but in all others Edith Cavell is an anti-Strachey, or perhaps a pre-Strachey, biography – a ...”