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“... with vignettes that run from The French Lieutenant’s Woman to The Devil Wore Prada to The Iron Lady. ‘You have to work doubly hard to make contemporary clothes disappear,’ another designer says, while Marit Allen, who worked on Brokeback Mountain, underlines the ‘subliminal telegraphy’ that clothes give out, adding the mysterious information that ...”

“... a match as if trying to set it on fire. In Charon’s boat I intend to give my seat to the first lady that comes along. Short poem: be brief and tell us everything. An old man huddled over a urinal with a doomsday sign on his back. The waiter’s name was Bartleby – or it should have been. He brought me two pieces of burnt toast on a cracked plate. I ...”

“... impasses – on ‘not getting it’ – in which she reproduces her college notes on ‘The Day Lady Died’, Frank O’Hara’s I-do-this-I-do-that poem. She laid bare the earnestness of the A-student – in primly rounded handwriting – with her crypto New Critical fatuities, noting, for example, the ‘lack of emotion in urban surroundings’. ‘For it ...”

“... he had to conduct conversations with – or rather deliver verbal messages to – her through a lady-in-waiting even though the duchess was seated only a few feet away. It may be true that the Emperor is supposed to have picked up a brush which Titian had dropped, but some distance must have been normal when the sitter was of high rank. Nor was a sitting ...”

“... with his ‘asinine high-pitched Bloomsbury voice’. One after another the nobs are scarified: Lady Diana Cooper, around whom ‘men of all ages flocked ... like gulls round a council tip,’ and who herself had ‘a talent for scavenging that would have done credit to a coyote’, Lady Mosley, Daphne Rae, Beatrice ...”

“... shoppers pluck polyunsaturate spreads from the shelves. ‘Eventually, I stopped one middle-aged lady, a dead ringer for Pauline from EastEnders, and asked why she had chosen the Flora, “Better for you innit?” she said, looking at me as if I was daft. “Better for me ol’ man. I wanna keep ’im just a bit longer, I do.” ’ Does Mrs Currie’s heart ...”

“... faces, cuffing and hustling them away from the cameras.9 May. Miss Shepherd’s funeral is at Our Lady of Hal, the Catholic church round the corner. The service has been slotted into the ten o’clock Mass so that, in addition to a contingent of neighbours, the congregation includes what I take to be regulars: the fat little man in thick glasses and trainers ...”

“... in which Chaplin had lived in Kennington, and Sir Ralph Richardson had just unveiled it, an old lady stopped and muttered within my hearing: ‘They’ve got the wrong house.’ They had indeed. David Robinson points out that the Chaplin family lived next door. Many specialists have tended to doubt the veracity of Chaplin’s autobiography, claiming that ...”

“... the same collection, about ‘An artist waiting in a country house’. The artist waits to see the lady, who had asked to see the man who painted the pictures. But he is kept waiting, as ‘minutes passed, unlived ... cinematic’, glimpsing the lady’s husband kissing her cheek outside the house. The ...”

“... placed Comus, the masque he wrote in 1634 and then substantially revised. A young virgin, ‘the Lady’, gets lost in the woods and encounters an evil and seductive enchanter, Comus, son of Circe. She resists his temptations and is rescued with the help of an Attendant Spirit (one of Milton’s daemons). It is hard not to see this as a trial run of Paradise ...”

“... craziness,’ Macgregor says. ‘Just think about it. Here we are in Kentish Town. A lady with the backing of the local newspaper wants a cancer drug, which she may need, but which costs £100,000. So we give it and treat her as well as we can. Then a lady in Tower Hamlets is turned down for the drug, because ...”

“... is unclear, and their identity is uncertain. But their names are usually given as George and Lady Mary Hamilton. The daughter appears to have been Sophia St John Hamilton. Just then Foscolo was brushing up his English by reading Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, which he later translated into Italian. The Hamiltons’ dashing and accommodating ...”

“... was a wonder, a legend. The writer Alexander Kinglake said that when he was a child in the 1820s Lady Hester Stanhope’s name was as well known to him as Robinson Crusoe’s, though he thought Crusoe was more believable. A century later, her table-talk (retailed in six volumes by her doctor-companion, Charles Meryon, and first published in 1845-46) was ...”

“... Charles Chaplin. Orson’s view was that he had first thought of the comedy about the French lady-killer Landru, a modern Bluebeard, which in 1947 became Monsieur Verdoux. He had already described its essence in 1941: There is one tableau, and it is the key to the whole film. There is Chaplin, dapper and blithe, clipping the hedges, making his hands and ...”

“... supply of aunts and uncles. Nothing could have done more to convince us that the formidable Lady Waters will play a decisive role in the lives of the protagonists of To the North (1932) than the genealogical flourish with which she is introduced: ‘Lady Waters had had no children by either marriage. Her first had ...”