“... physical touch – an experiment that John Malkovich tried as Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady (1997). Ryan’s monsters are always situated within the bounds of the probable. You can feel the depth of his achievement if you set him alongside two leading actors, Robert Mitchum and John Wayne, who bore a family resemblance to his masculine type in the ...”

“... catastrophe was that he survived.The first disaster is the condemnation of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936, experienced by him as a prelude to the Great Purges, when he feared an arrest that never came. The novel’s first scene has Shostakovich hovering in the evening by the lift outside his apartment, suitcase packed, so as not to be ...”

“... pours.’ On quiet evenings they enjoyed the Benny Hill Show. By the end of their lives Lord and Lady Snow had become a half-comical duo, not at home in a new world (‘the left was going all wrong on the cultural front’) and easily parodied. It was Olivia Manning’s inspiration to call them the Snows of yesteryear, and John Bird and Eleanor Bron sent ...”

“... years and his characters, especially Maudie, Countess of Littlehampton, Mrs Frogmarch the Tory lady and Canon Fontwater, played out the range of topical problems from the Cold War to the extremes of 1960s fashion. ‘Tell me, dear child,’ Maudie asks her pelmet-wearing daughter at Ascot, ‘which particular horse did you put your skirt on?’ The white ...”

“... felt that they were farming him out to ‘kennels’. Sometimes he was looked after by a cleaning lady called Mrs Bacon, a News of the World reader who gossiped about suicide and ‘cut brown bread so thinly that its fibres had to be bonded by slabs of butter’. In the school holidays he was sent to stay with various uncles and aunts (‘Uncle Hank and Uncle ...”

“... struck up a sexual liaison with one William Alder, who was discovered by a servant in bed with Lady Portsmouth while Portsmouth himself lay by the couple’s side, apparently asleep. It was troilism with a new twist. This, too, would serve later as evidence of his lunacy. It was proper for Alder to attend his wife at night, the earl insisted, since she was ...”

“... the couch with her shoes off and returning to find her mind changed, purse in hand, and the young lady ready to go home, dammit.’ Once she was suitably inebriated, the final trap was an Osvaldo Borsani couch that flipped to horizontal at the touch of a button. Design for the Playboy townhouse (1962) In the late 1950s, newly divorced, Hefner tried to ...”

“... notice – silently insert a $20 note before instructing me to go up to the counter and ask the lady to check again. This time, the only reply was the sound of computer keys being punched, followed by the screech of a dot matrix printer. Three tickets to Murmansk were thrust into my hand. The elation of having beaten the system dissipated as soon as I ...”

“... was raised to the peerage as Baron Snow of Leicester by the Labour government in 1964, she became Lady Snow in private life.Whose obituary is this? Johnson published a scandalous, bestselling novel at the age of 23. By the time she married Snow, her second husband, she had written 13 books. The biographical note to these new Hodder editions says, somewhat ...”

“... cremello ghost horses carrying the spectres of defeated Indians, castles that go up in flames, Lady Godiva, horned horses, the five-year-old “Elfin Equestrian”, Epsom on Derby day, six fairy ponies, one of whom leapt over the others, and two hundred Arabian horses re-enacting the Fall of Khartoum’. The equine performers were such ...”

“... under Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna’s direction – was hung beside a 16th-century icon of Our Lady of ...”

“... of the Gaelic League, receives two sentences. The contributions of Alice Milligan, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Constance Markievicz are ignored, presumably because they too were Protestants. So are the contributions of other revivalists, such as James Joyce, a Catholic nationalist who loathed the Church because of its condemnation of the nationalist ...”

“... waiting at the bottom of the ramp in the third book, who may or may not be the same ‘luscious lady’ with ‘shapely legs’ and a ‘short, snugly fitting blue pinstriped suit’ who mysteriously pays his bus fare in the first one. There’s also the bus conductress he will have to brush past in order to make his exit, ‘the thought of which made his ...”

“... realism, Agatha Christie, Marguerite Duras and D.H. Lawrence. (‘If I could write a novel like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I would die happy,’ she often gushed. Of course, ditto for me.)If there’s a whisper of satire here it’s never amplified – and satire as a genre is more shouty than whispery. Danlin’s opening self-presentation is close to ...”

“... two retinues got out of hand. When hogsheads of French wine were washed up at Preston in Sussex, Lady Shirley asked her steward to send them up to London ‘so we may drink it, which will end the dispute with the commissions of the customs’.When goods went missing it was always easy to blame the people who actually heaved them from the sea. Sir John ...”