“... of Nancy Mitford’s letters, Love from Nancy. Others who have been at the nest eggs include Mark Amory, who edited The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, and Artemis Cooper, who gave us the Waugh-Cooper correspondence in Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch. So what is left? We are assured that 80 per cent of the Mitford letters and 40 per cent of Waugh’s in this volume have ...”

“... about it, unlike Wilson. The death of his wife, after which he wore black for life, was a dividing mark in his career. There were fewer of those half-legendary carousals where tireless practical jokers downed ‘the Blood of Kings at only half-a-crown a bottle’ and bellowed songs about Burgundy and Roncesvalles. Some of that gusto now animated the younger ...”

“... resist borrowing for an epigraph John Masefield’s tribute to the great sailing ships: ‘They mark our passage as a race of men,/Earth will not see such ships as these again.’ This lively book is a zeppelin history which concentrates on the round-the-world voyage of the Graf Zeppelin in 1929. Anyone who supposes that Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was a ...”

“... was rebellion and it was saved for Metroland and the nation. World War One inevitably left its mark. Our ‘flying men’, it seems, did nothing to enhance property values on the Chiltern slopes. The Rothschild estate of Halton was ‘transformed into a vast camp of hutments, which played sad havoc with the beauty of the hillside towards Tring, and this ...”

“... of pure wildness’, Nelson writes, whereas sometimes she thinks her own sentences do no more than mark that wildness’s grave. Being by trade a poet of plain language – William Carlos Williams would be another hero, also George Oppen, also Eileen Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words ...”

“... by the one and reading a poem by the other, as there is, perhaps, between looking at a picture by Turner and reading a poem by Shelley. Wordsworth is limpid, reflective, precisely evocative of the joy or panic the poet has experienced in the face of given phenomena and of the mark this has left upon him; he essentially ...”

“... their ‘emoluments’ tucked under their napkins, but we are not told the rate for the job. To mark her feat Henriette was given a signed certificate of the type which today is earned merely by sitting in an aircraft as it passes over the Equator. My Ascent of Mont Blanc has been a long time on the way to the printers. Though no literary masterpiece, it is ...”

“... Horace Benedict de Saussure, who made the ascent the following year, with a young Englishman, Mark Beaufoy, hard on his heels. The insouciant Beaufoy, later a militia colonel and distinguished astronomer, admitted to wearing little more than the equivalent of a pair of pyjamas. The wars with Revolutionary France discouraged Alpinism, but by Byron’s day ...”

“... and are especially active, like the Surrealists, on the beaches. Tony Cragg, recently awarded the Turner Prize, made his name with relief murals composed of ‘beach-worn ship-refuse, plastic bottles, lids, frisbees, old toys, plastic milk crates’. For Waldemar Januszczak these were didactic – ‘one of the things they were about was the indisposability ...”

“... visionary. But his designs for the reconstruction of London’s sewers are not something Blake or Turner would have taken on. The directors of our own cultural establishments have not given up the notion that there is a place for gatekeepers, but they are more curious and less severe than the directors of the Royal Academy were in Martin’s day. They need ...”

“... Turner’s remark ‘Had Tom Girtin lived, I should have starved’ is as good a posthumous puff as any artist ever gave another. It’s printed on the back of Tate Britain’s Girtin catalogue. There it reads as a challenge. It puts you on your mettle as you walk past the many pictures whose original effect must be reconstructed from sheets that time has rendered curiously rusty or unnaturally blue ...”

“... in architecture, but country houses manage to secure a much wider, even popular, audience. Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House has actually become a best-seller – extraordinary in the field of architectural history – and its unprecedented success has encouraged Yale to issue as a companion volume a new edition of his earlier The ...”

“... pool, and a grotto with whirlpool baths modelled on the caves at Lascaux. The Mansion Mark II was a gated Neverland and, in its decadence, utterly kitsch. There was no explicitly modern décor. As in Chicago, the LA Mansion served as a backdrop for Playboy shoots, with subscribers offered a peek through the bunny-shaped keyhole. But the ...”

“... ideology around the globe (the curators resist the temptation to show how the émigrés left their mark on Britain). Many of the Bauhaus’s teachers emigrated to the US: Gropius and Breuer to the Harvard School of Design after a brief stint in London; Albers to Black Mountain College and Mies to the Institute of Technology in Chicago. In 1937, also in ...”

“... not in evidence here. The earliest exhibit at Dulwich is a small painting from 1908, Saxon Sydney-Turner at the Piano. It has something of Sargent’s slickness, though not put to quite the same effect (she liked filling in where he liked trailing off) and shows Sydney-Turner in profile at his instrument: the flair of his ...”