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“... aghast at the antics of ‘Snow Snifters’. Much later, dining with pop stars in Cheyne Walk, Lady Diana Cooper would mention that, in her day, post-prandial cocaine was served in salt-cellars. Hoare’s wartime London is a stage across which a troupe of affluent, cosmopolitan hipsters parade their unorthodoxy: the artist, drug addict, bisexual and ...”

“... novel about magic in the new age of science. Real people, from Newton to Swift, Handel, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mrs Manley, mingled with imaginary ones, not least the eponymous narrator of the title him/herself, a time-traveller from a late-20th-century mental hospital who switches gender in the process. Acts of Mutiny is equally ...”

“... Bush is clearly the better man these days, even if he looks as clueless as the Channel 5 weather lady. The Blair/Bush press conference was revealing. The press, in this instance two members of the British press, laid into Bush, not like our boys here do. You could see the sneer starting to take shape in the corner of his mouth, but he’d left the smirk at ...”

“... her eyes (a variant has ‘it shows thee to me’). But Donne’s poem ends by fretting over his lady’s potential infidelities, and Ashbery generalises the scepticism, extending it even to our understanding of our language and ourselves. ‘What you see will be used against you,’ he writes – a kind of Miranda warning – in the new book’s ‘Partial ...”

“... and Eva Le Gallienne in the United States. Even the ageing superstar Sarah Bernhardt appeared in Lady from the Sea in 1906. Meanwhile another set of directors and actors turned to Ibsen for quite different reasons. The young Aurélien Lugné-Poe hated naturalism and devised a new theatrical idealism that revelled in high poetic meaning and rarefied ...”

“... place in the land of Catita, where Jackanapes flies with his tail in his mouth, to seek out a lady as white as snow and as red as blood?’ Jack is dead. The character who speaks to Eumenides here, and asks to be taken into his service, is the grateful ghost of a poor man for whose burial Eumenides, although a stranger and mere passer-by, had earlier and ...”

“... Smith’. It’s a deeply affectionate term. Granny Smith is everyone, but particularly every old lady who lives alone and for whom the mail service is a lifeline. When an old lady gives me a Christmas card with a fiver slipped in with it and writes, ‘Thank you for thinking of me every day,’ she means it. I might be the ...”

“... to carry out a pictorial survey of Greek monuments in what was then Turkish territory; ‘and as lady Elgin possessed a taste for drawing’, a 19th-century source informs us, her husband ‘wished to know whether he would engage to assist her in decorating fire-screens, work-tables, and other such elegancies’. Complaining of the paltry salary on ...”

“... about his fitness for the part. You can guess the sensitivities stirring in his lofty remarks to Lady Blessington about authors of modest background making their ‘awkward efforts’ to ‘act the fine gentleman’. Gilmour chooses some telling anecdotes. At Cambridge, for example, Byron was evidently eager to play the lord and wore magnificent robes; but ...”

“... to beg the nation’s approval. Now that her mother is gone, the Queen has become the National Old Lady, and the papers have become busy inventing new forms of subjection to her heavenly qualities and brand new typefaces in which to express it. People who want to understand how the Windsors turned to politics – and how New Labour politicians turned to the ...”

“... from the saga of the Berlusconi divorce was briefly on offer thanks to the Italian-born first lady of France, and the nude portrait of her up for auction in Berlin. With so much going on at home to occupy them, the Italian press haven’t found a great deal of room to cover such dowdy scandals as who paid for the clearing of whose moat in ...”

“... Is this a crime scene? A collage? I looked for an explanation but there isn’t one. The First Lady of Ohio and Ronk’s Towing are thanked for their help. The visitor is then taken along a walkway between a full-scale Afghan heroin lab and a Colombian cocaine-processing plant. An audio recording plays from somewhere inside each, in that tricky way ...”

“... exists between two worlds, one to be accounted for in the dialect of common sense: the middle-aged lady opening a bookshop in East Anglia, the independent yet amenable, life-loving girls to be found in nearly all the books; and the other world, subject to incursions of supernatural evil, in the form of the appalling damp in the offices in ‘The Axe’, the ...”

“... pinned up on it, a pot of ivy and the sitter. The National Gallery’s picture by Liotard of a lady pouring chocolate comes closer to it: the room is modest, there is rush matting on the floor, on the wall there is one of those plain Dutch church interiors. It comes to you that when you can see a sitter’s feet – you can see both the baron’s and the ...”

“... a late interview. But then what happens when this incompetent thief writes, as Genet does in Our Lady of the Flowers, in the manner of a handbook on how to get away with it? Stealing from open displays is done according to several methods, and each kind of display, perhaps, requires one method rather than another. For example, with one hand, one can pick up ...”