“... Convention’, we find John Singer Sargent’s 1881 portrait of an austerely boyish Vernon Lee, and Alvaro Guevara’s Dame Edith Sitwell from 1916. Laura Knight, three years earlier, had been condemned by the Telegraph for a self-portrait with a nude model that lacked ‘the higher charm of the “eternal feminine”’. A few such notable nudes ...”

“... through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its interpreters, soliciting contributions to an open-ended project. The names of the poets were the stanzas of a continuous book. Aidan ...”

“... acquaintances remember a trusty William Morris carrier, and she took a spongebag, Hermione Lee reports, to the Booker dinner. In her letters she uses the dotty-lady schtick for two main purposes. It’s there to entertain and mollify her daughters, on whom she depended for all sorts of things: ‘Marina Warner came to lecture at the Highgate Institute ...”

“... racing water, then a spangle of light fragments like big fish-scales, then the thing itself – a silver ingot, rigid and heavy, its lower jaw stuck out. When it found me and the dog looming over the bank, all its energy came back in a thunderbolt, the silver etherising at once, the water empty, my mother cursing. Which ...”

“... Eliot (Michael Caine) contrives to cross paths on a Manhattan street with his sister-in-law. Lee (Barbara Hershey), with whom he has fallen in love. He pretends to be hunting for a bookshop: she shows him the way to it and there he finds, as if by chance, E.E. Cummings’s Collected Poems, which he insists on buying for her. Putting her into a taxi he ...”

“... magi-coal effect’ of the pile of bricks on which Brünnhilde reclined in Orange, or the ‘silver rabbit’s-ears helmet’ worn by Wotan.Wagner’s music-dramas placed impossible demands on theatrical machinery. The Festspielhaus created at Bayreuth in 1876, dedicated to the performance of his works, developed an array of novel special effects ...”

“... commercial traffic: ‘ “Half-um?” he says witheringly. “Half-um? Me tink-ee mak-ee half-um silver dollar can buy all-um duck market hab got Canton-side.” ’ (This time it is the American Eastman talking.) For any other form of cultural exchange it is worse than useless – ‘ridiculous nonsense’, as Mo reassuringly calls it later in the ...”

“... sand; echoing corrugated-iron sheds where shears clipped steel sheet like cardboard, and whorls of silver metal spun off lathes. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters’ shops: wee men in big glasses chop-chop-chopping with a chisel until a perfect mortice joint emerged. ‘Fine day, Mr Aikman. Everybody satisfied wi’ the boat? No a great looker, but she ...”

“... pose with some favourite objects. He chose that most crucial piece of drug-taking paraphernalia, silver foil. The nearest bit to hand was an unwrapped Kit Kat, and the singer was duly snapped holding one. Believing this to be a simple endorsement of their chocolate bar, Rowntrees – the manufacturers – later delivered to him two large boxes full of Kit ...”

“... Bazaar at the time – and tenanted by Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee; shorter-term residents included Louis MacNeice, Auden’s lover Chester Kallman and Salvador Dali. The poem consists of a monologue by each of these. Like ‘Immram’ and ‘The more a man has the more a man wants’, ‘7, Middagh Street’ is a beguiling ...”

“... His skill arouses Margarita, who has ‘a passion for all people who do anything to perfection’. Lee Goff’s peculiar skill evokes the same delight and horror as that of the perfect assassin, though he is dealing with the effects of other people’s murders, and not doing any killing himself (except of pigs and rabbits). It is a fine thing, rare in fiction ...”

“... these. With President Wilson America is firmly launched on the world stage, but the champagne and silver-fork Washington circuit, even with Hollywood as an occasional bonus, proves a rather inadequate vantagepoint from which to portray, for example, the First World War. This was an epoch when Presidential illnesses had much impact on political life, and in ...”

“... was in his early twenties, tall, good-looking and a genius. He was also rich. He ate off silver plate. His hubris was staggering even in an age and a city known for its swagger. Pico thought he could prove that all of the world’s philosophical and religious traditions were, in fact, one. He would show the secret concord between Aristotle and ...”

“... British Vogue was born in September 1916, when German U-boats (really quite chic in their way – silver-blue with muscular lines) prevented the Americans from transporting their edition to British shores. Muir, in his catalogue introduction, points out that Vogue’s inception coincided with Haig’s launch of the tank at the Battle of the Somme, which gives ...”

“... the collection. But there are also valuable pieces on popular culture – Frank Bruno, Spike Lee, the iconography of album covers; and an emphasis on the relationship between race and nation, the possibility of Black Britishness, that ties it closer to his earlier There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987). Gilroy’s insistence that it is ...”