“... treated more carefully by George. Myrtle is sent to a posh boarding school to be ‘made into a lady’. Pompey Jones becomes a regular visitor to the Hardy household, on the pretext of doing odd jobs for George, but is sent away when one of his mysterious re-arrangements of the household furnishings causes George’s pregnant wife, Annie, to fall ...”

“... Lent.In 1566, Antwerp’s fragile religious accord cracked. Protestants attacked the Church of Our Lady, and within the hour, every church and monastery in the city was besieged by image-breakers. The mapmaker Abraham Ortelius, whose business depended on Antwerp’s cosmopolitanism, mourned that ‘the churches looked as though the devil had been at work there ...”

“... purchase limits. Within five hours, seven of Wu’s songs were outperforming Ariana Grande and Lady Gaga. The fans also figured out various ways to ‘slaughter’ Spotify, the Billboard Hot 100, the trending algorithms on YouTube and Twitter etc. The next time you see a strange name on the major pop charts, don’t be surprised: tech-savvy Chinese ...”

“... be impressed by the parade of celebrities at Hillary Clinton’s rallies – Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, Bruce Springsteen etc. The French use the expression ‘la richesse insultante’. What does it mean for someone on social security to walk past shops with watches or shoes or dresses marked in the thousands of dollars? Each price ...”

“... a world of scurrying maids, laughing guards, courtiers ‘jealously discussing a posting’, a lady scuttling out of an equerry’s chamber.Lucrezia thinks in metaphors of embroidery and painting because they’re what she knows best. Outside the cathedral on the morning of her wedding, she notices the way ‘the campanile has stitched itself to the summer ...”

“... a Sicilian word for a child; the suffix means ‘big’; Hunt translates the name as ‘the Little Lady’, which seems to get the irony back to front). The Picciridduna, they say, is three metres tall and can cure la Rossa by kissing you on the mouth. Or maybe you need to burn her alive and eat the ashes. Or maybe it’s all nonsense. In any case, the reality ...”

“... children, is a map copied by one of the royal infants from the jigsaws used by their governess, Lady Charlotte Finch, to teach them geography. It indicates, with affecting but spurious precision, the territorial boundaries of the 12 tribes of Israel, in what the children, like almost everyone else in the 18th and 19th centuries, called the Holy Land. When ...”

“... political affiliation, friend or foe, guilt or innocence. Mrs Coyle, Michael’s Catholic cleaning lady, whose son is holed up in police custody, ‘visibly unfurls’ on hearing Cushla’s Gaelic name; at the other end of the spectrum, Victor, one of Michael’s middle-class friends, sits ‘peering at her through the smoke from the cigar he was toking ...”

“... her and proceeded to undress: it did the trick. At a party Jung suggested to a German-American lady that her dislike of black coffee was linked to a desire to get pregnant; this offence against social manners distressed Mrs Jung, who later declared: ‘I am going to write a psychotherapeutic handbook for gentlemen.’ And speaking of the coincidence early ...”

“... Maxwell, daughter of Ernie ‘the Oil King’ Maxwell and his much younger Mexican cleaning lady. Finally, there are Lee’s roommates: Dede, ‘literally, a follower’, whose obvious Jewishness disqualifies her from consideration as a Serious Babe, and Sin-Jun, a deceptively mild Korean who hides a squid (among other things) in her closet and later ...”

“... unusually explicit about the fissure that runs through his work: ‘No one is going to catch me, lady, and make me a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun. (So perhaps he thinks, but it is only his greatest pretend.)’ One reason for his reluctance to identify with adults was that he could hardly look them in the eye. He never grew much ...”

“... the meat is human flesh. The reason they raided the apartment was that the letter the young lady was asked to deliver contained only one sentence: ‘This is the last one I am sending you today.’ The dissemination of this rumour has meagre ideological value, and the motive for its transmission is largely its tellability. This may be why in some ...”

“... scruple, the sheer vindictiveness of Amis’s grammatical sneer at his own character Doll – ‘Lady Luck, that day, smiled on we Pretorians’ – even though that again seems typical of the miniature, interstitial, finally inconsequential scale of the imagination on display. The book as a whole strikingly lacks the dimension of fear: it is far too breezy ...”

“... pages with something. So Beauman gives a thorough report of the time when Taylor, almost an old lady, invited two friends to luncheon in 1969 and they came on the wrong day: Herman declared Elizabeth had got it wrong and then sent what must have been a forged carbon copy of his original acceptance card ‘proving’ they had been due a day later. But ...”

“... Surprisingly little has been written recently about birdwatching. For Mynott, the image of the old lady paying her sub to the RSPB, hanging out fat balls and talking to the robin in her back garden can’t do the subject justice. His book is dense with evidence of the penetration of birds into our lives and vice versa. It is interested in American sports team ...”