“... was also a superb listener, notorious on walks or wartime marches for stopping every old peasant lady or charcoal burner to ask for their opinion and biography. As he wrote about himself, ‘ever since I could remember, my boredom threshold had been so high that it scarcely existed at all … I was unboreable, like an unsinkable battleship.’ Unboreable and ...”

“... into something we already know. Aubrey, always unmarried, saved some of his most fervent prose for Lady Venetia Stanley, ‘a most beautifull, desireable Creature’, and the subject of endless court gossip: ‘a most lovely sweet turn’d face, delicate darke browne haire … her face, a short ovall, darke-browne eie-browe: about which much sweetness, as also ...”

“... I hung my head, dropped my shoulders and tried to feel wrecked. ‘Are you all right?’ a kind lady at the next table asked. I had to admit I was. But what of Jones? Would he recover? How long would it take? ‘Snow Storm – Steam-boat off a Harbour’s Mouth’ (c.1842) ‘The Blue Rigi, Sunrise’ (1842) ‘Rain, Steam and Speed – the Great Western ...”

“... on the grounds that one could hardly ‘expect Madame Karsavina to appear as Eve. A married lady! But she won’t hear of it!!’ In due course Lambert was to become artistic director of the Vic-Wells (later Sadler’s Wells, and later still the Royal Ballet), and its regular conductor. Lloyd quotes various testimonials to his brilliance as a dance ...”

“... Eagleton as George McGovern’s running mate. The Shrivers’ daughter Maria was later First Lady of California as the wife, subsequently estranged, of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Edward Kennedy thought his moment had come in 1980, when an opportunity seemed to open to topple the sitting president, a weakened Jimmy Carter, from the Democrat ...”

“... the state claim millions of adherents. More than a million people have visited the shrine of the Lady of the Realm, Ba Chua Xu, in southern Vietnam every year since the early 1990s: religion seems to offer the solace that the state can no longer provide, given the economic, social and cultural dislocations of the market economy. Buddhist monks in Hue ...”

“... began to take their own lives in droves towards the middle of the 18th century – in 1759 Lady Montagu called it a ‘fashion’ – but this striking development certainly wasn’t caused by a lack of social integration, or by what George Cheyne, in a bestselling book of 1733, diagnosed as The English Malady, a melancholy he attributed to the effects ...”

“... One Sunday​ in October 2017, a crowd gathered outside Our Lady, Queen of Polish Martyrs church, in the eastern Warsaw neighbourhood of Grochów. They were there to see the unveiling of a commemorative plaque: ‘In Memory of the 200,000 Poles Murdered in Warsaw in the German Death Camp KL Warschau.’ Flanked by two soldiers, the plaque was sprinkled with holy water by a priest and then saluted by an army officer, who laid a wreath ...”

“... small sloping eyes.’ Where there is humour, it’s often very dark. Black tells of an old lady murdered for her pension by her carer, who turned herself in to the police twenty years later. She told them where to find the torso and limbs, but confessed she’d kept the head wrapped in plastic in her potting shed. ‘Most cases end up with a ...”

“... Romeo and Juliet, The Widow of an Indian Chief watching over the arms of her deceased husband, The Lady in Milton’s Comus and other pictures essentially literary in their inspiration. Here the provincial label really does fail to stick: but the pictures also have little of the strangeness which makes so many of the others memorable. In his landscape ...”

“... partly the function of her very creditable willingness to listen to him, a redeeming virtue in the lady but not enough! Instructively, since most of Clark’s judgments are morally sound, he is also nice about John Major, who tries to be helpful. He gets on with left-wing Labour men like the tirelessly depressing Bob Cryer, but does so ...”

“... famous trio of this time, William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Devonshire, his wife Georgiana and Lady Elizabeth Foster, concealed their goings-on and their miscellaneous progeny in the grand seclusion of Chatsworth and Devonshire House. Less socially-exalted, the Hamiltons and Nelson were at once more notorious and far more vulnerable. All three were ...”

“... exploded: ‘I have waited five weeks for a decision and I can’t wait any longer. I shall tell Lady Allenby to come home.’ Lloyd George took him by the arm and said, ‘You have waited five weeks, Lord Allenby, wait five minutes more.’ Fuming, Allenby waited – and got what he wanted. Allenby’s emancipatory decree, like others elsewhere, turned out ...”

“... She also disliked and distrusted Bloomsbury gossip. Fry had been having a lightning affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell, about which he had dropped hints to Virginia. Vanessa didn’t mind the affair – she seems to have been naturally lacking in feelings of envy and jealousy – but she cautioned her lover against telling her sister anything. I found she ...”

“... of rain, or suffering asthma from the humid heat, to talk to them. The target might be a white lady or a black preacher or a student of Mississippi rednecks, whose dress and speech habits are here fastidiously registered. Or it might be somebody who can instruct Naipaul in the country music centred on Nashville, for that music, of which he says he ...”