“... friend of Proust and Maeterlinck; Olive Custance, known as ‘Opale’, who subsequently married Lord Alfred Douglas (the Wilde thing again). Yet however paradoxically, Barney’s major attachments – the two or three that really mattered to her – seemed simply to underscore again the grisly old law of lesbian thermodynamics: there aren’t enough of us ...”

“... in its way, was a reply. I was eight; I knew the game.I have no memory of the packing up of our home, just that I was standing on the pavement outside holding a small, colourful box whose lid closed with a tiny brass latch, into which I had put IMPORTANT THINGS: a charm in the form of a watermill whose wheel actually turned, a bright red gobstopper ...”

“... affair with Rodolphe. In Flaubert’s notes for the novel, he has her on one occasion returning home across the fields ‘le foutre dans les cheveux’ – with spunk in her hair. The book’s readers were spared this detail.A Single Word …changes everything. In Perrin’s lexicon there are 834 uses of the possessive article son, and 817 of du. In Part ...”

“... to Simenon’s excellent biographer Patrick Marnham it’s a would-be humorous story about his home town, Liège, ‘partly set in a chemist’s shop which specialised in laxatives for pigeons’. Over the next few years, under a variety of pseudonyms, he wrote 150 or so pulp books, mainly of novella length, from titillating near porn to thrillers to ...”

“... in an era of populist demagoguery. Trump, Putin, Modi, Orbán: Netanyahu could hardly be more at home in a world of nationalist strongmen. Without giving up an inch of occupied land, he has won over Sunni Arab states paralysed by fear of Shia Iran, fed up with the Palestinians and incapable of exerting pressure on Israel. Palestinian resistance in the West ...”

“... She wrote:I thought I was indulging in play, and lost myself.O for the day that is dying!At home I was secluded, unknown,When I left home, my fame spread far and wide,The pious laid all their merit at my feet.O for the day that is dying!My beauty was like a warehouse filled with rare merchandise,Which drew men from ...”

“... between its crowded banks. At dusk, holding a drink by the window and waiting for Jane to return home, I loved to see the city streetlights arrive in amber hesitations. But London was swallowing everything we earned. My extravagant tastes were surely not helping. For these I blame my late father. In 1959, Father, who had been teaching theology at Durham ...”

“... her distant new husband, ‘so Instead of Dressing showily, or behaving usefully – I sate at home and wrote Verses.’ But Thrale wasn’t impressed and Johnson stepped into the void, translating the Odes of Boethius in alternate verses with his hostess and helping to publish the poetry (most famously a popular ballad, ‘The Three Warnings’) that ...”

“... and 12th centuries were the cheerleaders for Mary, and pilgrims to sites throughout Europe took home news of cures and miracles and carried her devotion far and wide. Between 1000 and 1200, as the parish structure was set into place throughout the continent, statues of Mary appeared in almost every church. Over the next two centuries she was made ‘local ...”

“... Kemble was an abolitionist; and her incipient feminism could scarcely have bumped up against a ‘lord and master’ – the irony is hers – more inclined to insist on his conventional prerogatives. Though she had married partly under the illusion that she could thereby exchange her theatrical career for a literary one, the couple had scarcely returned from ...”

“... Union during the devolution campaign of the late 1970s, Trevor-Roper had taken the title of Lord Dacre of Glanton, and had left the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford for the mastership of Peterhouse, the oldest and most conservative college in Cambridge. His years at Peterhouse (from 1980 to 1987) were far from happy. An ultra-reactionary ...”

“... instance, I was reassured to find myself not alone in feeling like this. On the death of Crabbe Lord Melbourne wrote: ‘I am always glad when one of those fellows dies for then I know I have the whole of him on my shelf.’ Which is, of course, the cue for biography.This is the fifth play on which Nicholas Hytner and I have collaborated, not counting two ...”

“... to land ownership, which persists in a more democratic form in the national obsession with home ownership, overrode every other concern, then as now with mixed results. Despite threats to the preservation of Hadrian’s Wall and Stonehenge, both Houses of Parliament fiercely resisted the first Ancient Monuments Protection Bill, which took nine years ...”

“... seven speakers. It was ‘highly interesting’, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, adding: ‘Lord knows what I didn’t read into their reading.’ Supposedly a secret society, it largely remained so until after the Second World War. The first and most enduring members were Molly and Desmond MacCarthy, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Vanessa and Clive ...”

“... of glass’, and chambers that in size and opulence outdid some of Henry’s permanent houses back home – merited the simplest and greatest of comparisons: ‘Leonardo,’ he wrote, ‘could not have done it so well.’ The Field of Cloth of Gold’s scale and complexity reflected the momentous nature of the encounter: the first meeting, in person, between ...”