“... These shade into the unhappy husbands of the 1950s and 1960s, with their deadening but precarious white-collar jobs, and their drinking problems. The few excursions away from these areas – there are stories set in Hollywood, and stories about political speech-writing – have biographical explanations. Like many writers, Yates felt compelled to rewrite ...”

“... that I could need £100. I’d go down there and he still wouldn’t pay me, and yet he’d have a white Rolls Royce with a chauffeur sitting outside waiting to take him wherever he wanted to go. But who says he paid the chauffeur? Not settling debts is hardly unheard of in Old Etonians. But Robert was a first-generation Etonian, and might conceivably have ...”

“... few days after James Schuyler had been admitted to Bloomingdale Hospital, a mental institution in White Plains, New York. Schuyler still gets his semi-colons right, and his appetite for gossip is undiminished: ‘Is it still Connecticut, the dear deer, the steady lay, the unprivate walls?’ His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having ...”

“... Aryan conquest in India, opened a gulf never filled up. In the Highlands, unlike Ireland, Anglo-Norman intrusion sponsored by native kings engendered a form of feudalism, clothed in kinship ties and clan sentiment, which made for a firm vertical integration of society. Both regions might be backward compared with England, but observers in Ireland seem to ...”

“... before she went doolally and began putting cotton wool in her ears and powdering her face chalk-white, married a Norwegian who came up the river one day, a man referred to ever after as ‘Captain’. My Dad went spotting mines with the Sea Scouts during the war, and involuntarily helped the Axis powers by putting his boot through the canoe. The family on ...”

“... occasion, Begg had been embarrassed at how badly dressed the diplomat was, in his pink shirt and white slacks, compared with his favourite American interrogator, the well turned-out ‘Kim’. With characteristic restraint, Begg describes his relationship with Martin as ‘full of disappointments’. He could have been describing his relationship with ...”

“... among the most famous photographs ever taken. So stark is the contrast between Aldrin in his white spacesuit and the empty grey desert he stands on – the black of space beyond, the sun out of sight – that while it is, obviously, a photograph of a man on the moon it is also a picture of the living and the dead. For Armstrong, who always saw things ...”

“... at Holkham, was done according to the traditions of the landed aristocracy. The bride wore a white Norman Hartnell gown; the long gallery was filled with presents, ‘including a silver inkwell from the queen’. Tenants from both family estates feasted in three marquees in the park, each with its own wedding cake. Princess Margaret, still ...”

“... a lot of ‘entering’ and not much kissing. I wondered if Rooney has ever read Don DeLillo’s White Noise, in which Jack and Babette in bed make fun of ‘entering’ as a euphemism for fucking. The word ‘whimpering’ comes up with reference to noises both Alice and Eileen make: I couldn’t tell if this was meant to be sexy or a joke. Either way, I ...”

“... Isurround myself​ with fish: the brown and white aboriginal angel fish in my bathroom, the carved turquoise and yellow Zuni salmon in my study, trout decoys in the conservatory, at the bottom of my garden a pond filled with tangerine-coloured koi. In the unbearable holiday of lockdown, I spent a lot of time by the pond, sitting in the dappled light, letting the burble of the artificial stream work its emollient voodoo, hankering to cast a line into fast water ...”

“... pieces, which (like Tiepolo beggars) are suited by palatial spaces. However, the organisers, Norman Rosenthal and Germano Celant, have done something more daring with the space: they have filled it with art, much of it unfashionable, dating from 1919 to 1934, the time of the rise of Fascism. They have put sculptures by Arturo Martini and paintings by ...”

“... hegemony is not impossible to imagine; or of Europe and America against Japan and the Far East, White against Yellow. This is already being whispered about. In the USA they are still busy inventing secret devices for killing human beings rapidly from a safe distance, an art so dramatically demonstrated this year in Iraq; and the CIA is no less potent and ...”

“... him inside their houses – when finally they do take to him.’ These pamphlets are discussed in Norman Longmate’s The GI’s: The Americans in Britain, 1942-1945,* one of the first attempts to study this wider aspect of the English-speaking union. Longmate is as anecdotal as Professor Weintraub, but naturally draws his information from oral sources ...”

“... and accorded his copy of Alberto Sartoris’s important 1948 survey the rather surreal honour of a white fur binding. (Many years later he showed the well-used and grubby object to Sartoris, a distinguished Roman academic, who was predictably horrified by it.) Having been a bird-watching, un-academic schoolboy, Stirling now read voraciously and ...”

“... all that mud-stained primitive clutter: for an inkling of how matters stood at the Louvre, imagine Norman Bates having to watch Marion Crane’s car being winched from the swamp beside the motel. A solution was found. It appeared to favour the rugged party over the dandies and took the form of a new commission. The building would go up on a plot of public land ...”