“... own mixture of knowingness and innocence. Without it, there might have been no The Portrait of a Lady, no Moulin Rouge, no The Others, no accepting an Oscar for her maudlin act with a prosthetic nose as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. By portraying a starlet so cleverly, Kidman acted her way out of any assumption that she herself was nothing but a starlet. By ...”

“... for her to form a hunting party, or rush out and scalp me; though I know she’s a small poor lady, with a piping voice and a bird’s neck. Till someone explains why it’s wrong, I’m sticking by my joke. I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s the only joke I’ve got. I know everything about denominations: church, chapel, various chapels, Protestant ...”

“... stiff and virginal, stood two almost empty bottles of brandy and gin. Carlos finished off the lady’s gin, and her hard bed was left as turbulent and disorderly as a battlefield. Each is more literal than the other at times. Pinheiro and Stevens keep the mountain (‘montão’) of bibles, and lose the nest (‘ninho’) of the same; generally stick ...”

“... in short not one window, but a million,’ Henry James wrote in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady), which makes the characters who occupy it tenants of a sort. Tenants can be unruly, do damage to the fixtures, take over the place. You can see why a writer might want to tame them. In Cortázar’s ‘Casa Tomada’, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall ...”

“... grandmother designed the sensational beetle-wing costume in which Ellen Terry appeared as Lady Macbeth. Committed Liberals in politics, they had also produced a number of distinguished lawyers. Richard, with his combination of tweed, brogues and a job in the Foreign Office, his taste for gold-tipped cigarettes and a subscription to an anarchist ...”

“... of a hotel valet peering through keyholes into guests’ rooms, and Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake, from 1946, filmed entirely as if from the point of view of detective Philip Marlowe.) Similarly, the editing technique of shot/reverse shot – the camera shows an actor’s face, then what he is looking at, then the actor’s face again ...”

“... the UK’s newish Supreme Court might develop into anything resembling the US Supreme Court. After Lady Hale’s disembowelling of Johnson’s illegitimate attempt to prorogue Parliament, they yearn for the days when the lord chancellor really did embody the law and did pretty much what his cabinet colleagues asked him to; a clubbable chap like Michael Havers ...”

“... into the rain. The Tube was crowded at Bank, everyone keeping themselves to themselves, the Indian lady in sandals and socks, the young man with earphones and jagged hair lost in beats not his own; the lady across from me with the Aztec necklace, the man in the North Face jacket, the schoolchild looking out anxiously for her ...”

“... bought them and lots of other fabulous items, ready for what she planned to be her UK debut as Lady Lazarus, rising from the wreckage of her family: her stepfather, her mother and her grandmother had all died within a few years. She must have been both liberated and devastated. The important thing, though, was that the deaths had left her rich.Acker’s ...”

“... with another woman. No wonder figures like Wyndham Lewis couldn’t take it – the ‘Jewish lady’ was a ‘highbrow clown’. (Antisemitism was an undeniable theme in her reception by the more talented modernists too: in Eliot’s fear of her work instituting a ‘new barbarian age’ or Ezra Pound claiming that ‘Gertie Stein … writes yittish wit ...”

“... us right inside one of the rooms in his house, and shows us three men in bed with a light-tailed lady whose services they must surely be paying him for. ‘If it be not a bawd’s house,’ Constable Elbow says, it is certainly ‘a naughty house’. He is talking of Mistress Overdone’s brothel, a place so dodgy that even the irreproachable Mrs Elbow might ...”

“... in John Closterman’s group portrait of the Marlborough family at Blenheim: an aristocratic lady with an authority that comes in part from her willingness to adopt something of the more responsible values of the middling class. Once the Stuarts are dispatched, the story of art that Solkin tells, for the early 18th century, is the story of the relation ...”

“... lord’, controlling the Express empire, as well as a member of the coalition cabinet. Soon Lady Diana herself would take the Beaver’s shilling and write a column in the Sunday Express until the editor managed to suppress it (‘the veriest twaddle’). This snapshot – one of many in Charles Williams’s biography – reveals two factors in ...”

“... in India Conquered: the Brighton Pavilion was not built by Prince Albert; the viceroy who was Lady Dorothy Macmillan’s grandfather and whose portrait gazed down on Harold Macmillan was Lansdowne, not Dufferin. But in general, Wilson’s thesis stands up to examination, not least to the self-examination of the collectors who sweltered through the hot ...”

“... Paris she returns to America aged 20, an orphaned heiress. Like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (‘as nearly perfect a work as a novel can be,’ Vidal has written), she is determined to be free and to see the world. Hay is a version of Mr Touchett, his son Del the doomed Ralph. Del’s perfunctory demise is something of a joke, but Vidal’s witty ...”