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“... many of those involved hung out at the Chat Noir. Satie fell in with Joséphin Péladan, a cape-wearing Kabbalist from Lyon with a forked beard and hair like an electrified bird’s nest. He was the ‘Imperator’ and ‘Sâr’ (a title he claimed was bestowed on his family by a Babylonian king) of a Rosicrucian order called the Rose + Croix ...”

“... and any number of ministers and favourites. In Mary Rose, his book about Brandon’s third wife, David Loades says: ‘He was present everywhere, but it is hard to pinpoint what he actually did.’ Throughout his career Charles accumulated grand-sounding titles, which confused outsiders into overestimating his importance as a policymaker. When he became ...”

“... too much John Hoyer Updike. In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has ...”

“... the British army and defend the Soviet Union. In the December 1942 wedding photograph my father is wearing a cheeky smile and a British army uniform. He fought, like a number of British communists, at Monte Cassino. My mother, whose father was the prime minister of the Punjab, impulsively donated most of her wedding jewellery to the CPI. Before all that she ...”

“... the book mentions Kipling, Disraeli, Wilde, Koestler and Naipaul, the last two as foreign writers wearing ‘loud tweed jackets’ on the jackets of their books (Buruma himself sports one on his). National identity matters most at the borders, or on the fringes, and the narrator here, collecting expert testimony and seeking permission to see Ranji’s ...”

“... as she admits, ‘but if you wish to remember the past it helps to remember what you were wearing.’ She was the daughter of Liverpool people, a Welshwoman and a Russo-Finn: her father belonged to a Positivist sect, called the Church of Humanity, and her mother to the Church in Wales. The young Alice used to attend the English Congregational Church ...”

“... eccentrically unapproachable than ever. During a series of his 1989 shows he appeared on stage wearing not only a hood but a peaked cap to conceal his features still further. At other concerts he insisted the lights be turned down to the point of near-darkness. His live performances, which have been all but continuous for the last three years, are wildly ...”

“... three or four years later at the New York Princeton Club; two tables away from me, he seemed to be wearing the same dark suit, white button-down shirt and nondescript tie that I remembered from Miss Whitehead’s shop. This time he was with a woman I took to be his wife, reading some galley proofs at her, she silently eating and drinking as he droned on and ...”

“... A moon-faced vicar or two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on the dishonest line of the Communist Party. No doubt there was a resolution to send a telegram to Downing Street. There was also, I dare say for the sake of ‘unity’, a pro-Chinese ...”

“... amount of Paul Bowles ‘that shameless faker’ – a view later revised – and his ‘dungaree-wearing Lizzie wife’, Jane, whose own arrangement was the mirror-image of Burroughs’s with Joan. There is also Auden’s secretary Alan Ansen, who gets no credit here for working on the Naked Lunch manuscript with Ginsberg. Auden himself is briskly invoked ...”

“... essay Wolfgang Kemp gives special attention to the highly controversial frame that Caspar David Friedrich designed for his Cross in the Mountains. It consists of a gothic arch composed of palm fronds, and a predella decorated with wheat, a vine and a diagrammatic eye. In 1808 Friedrich exhibited the painting in this frame in his studio before sending ...”

“... It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg and William Roberts – and a revolutionary moment in British art. Even to express support for Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions was daring and radical. Nevinson, having seen a contemporary art show in Venice, knew he was ‘bored with ...”

“... the lighter cavalry (Mlle de Scudéry, Voltaire, Alfieri, Nathaniel Lee, Gavin Hamilton, J.-L. David). However, Donaldson sharply registers the enormous popularity of the myth across the centuries, and the ways in which controversy has enlivened and enlarged it rather than killing it off. Readings of a myth become part of the myth, as Lévi-Strauss said of ...”

“... a fancy hat, a bunch of curls like cabbages. They have grace, and the comic appeal of sculptures wearing gloves. Both her drawings and her poems show people caught in a lifetime’s grimace or grin: ‘With my looks I am bound to look simple or fast ... ’ Barbera and McBrien, perhaps prompted by a letter in which Stevie Smith explained that one volume of ...”

“... At a session with Roy Cohn in the Plaza Hotel in 1958, the Director of the FBI was allegedly wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces, and lace stockings and high heels, and a black curly wig. He had make-up on, and false eyelashes. It was a very short skirt, and he was sitting there in the living room of the suite with his legs ...”