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“... held in their hands warped inside him, and he wore it like a cloak ...’ This is the work of a young English writer drawing on her own experience of a remote valley in Venezuela, but recording it with an eye more on the bizarre or appalling than on ordinary life. Even the domestic details seem hardly ordinary – such as vulture’s eggs for supper, or ...”

“... during the Twenties and Thirties. His son, the third Earl, who took over the work, died tragically young in 1985. Robin Birkenhead’s draft extended to the end of 1940. It had been shown to Sir John Colville, who was asked to finish the story. He declined, but wrote an epilogue giving his own view of the Churchill he had known. He died suddenly in October ...”

“... the picture as ‘la symphonie du blanc’. Vergo finds various other dead ends. In Cézanne’s Young Girl at the Piano: Overture to ‘Tannhäuser’ (1869-70), an old woman sits mending a stocking while a girl extends her skeletal fingers over the piano keys; but the sheet music is blank, and the association with Wagner is a pretentious appendage to an ...”

“... David Robert Jones, alias David Bowie, is now in his 40th year. His creepy, chilling phrases pop out of pub jukeboxes, and extracts from his movies catch the eye on pub videos, whether he is embracing a Chinese girl or being executed by Japanese soldiers; his image appears in the Sunday-paper magazines, artistically displayed in sundry poses ...”

“... a big business, but not, as it is now, a corporate power that crosses national and class borders. Robert Altman’s new film, Prêt-à-Porter, is like La Dolce Vita grafted onto Funny Face. The unaffected and trusting Hepburn and Astaire would be marginalised or crushed in the fashion world portrayed here. Altman has never enjoyed a sustained period of ...”

“... painted around the time of William’s death in 1663 and commissioned either by him or his son Robert. Having existed in obscurity for centuries (on its donation to Norwich Castle Museum, the last owner warned: ‘the painting is very faded, of no artistic value, only curious from an archaeological point of view’), it is now the subject of a huge ...”

“... difficult relationship, and any vestiges of paradise faded quickly. Photographed nude by her young husband in ‘“artistic” poses’, Peter’s mother, Nan, was a midwife’s daughter who later told Peter that her father had raped her mother ‘at knifepoint on their wedding night because she was menstruating and reluctant to make love’. Peter was ...”

“... Margaret Thatcher. He not only recites the well-known story of Harold Macmillan’s cuckolding by Robert Boothby but indulges himself in fascinated gossip about who then got Sara Macmillan (or Boothby) pregnant, driving her to alcoholism and an early death. Junor’s patron, Lord Beaverbrook, receives a full working-over. He apparently insisted at one time ...”

“... for a surprisingly long time, but when scandal finally came in 1996 – a currency trader called Robert Young, working in cahoots with Cantrade Bank, a Jersey subsidiary of the Swiss banking giant UBS, defrauded investors of $26 million – the Wall Street Journal concluded that Jersey was an offshore hazard ‘living off lax regulation and political ...”

“... assayer in the United States Mint in Philadelphia. Stock points out that in the 1890s the young Ezra ‘mixed with the assayers and drank in stories about “gold bricks”, which he still remembered in 1944 when he wrote his pamphlet on the “Economic Nature of the United States”’. Pound was still alive when Stock was writing, and assisted ...”

“... table in 1604 were linked to William Byrd.1 The most powerful, the great Protestant statesman Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, was the dedicatee of one of Byrd’s last and most haunting keyboard ensembles of pavan and galliard, so popular that they were still admired and adapted through the centuries when most Tudor music was relegated to the archives.2 ...”

“... as real today as it was presumably in his nursery. He once asked Gromyko to send a lot of Russian young to meet a comparable number of British boys and girls at work and play. Mr Gromyko replied that he wouldn’t like to expose his young to the decadence of our modern youth. Of course the real reason, adds the writer, was ...”

“... year in the sixth form at St Theresa’s. Confessing it now, after some weeks in the company of young men who had, it seemed, done it quite a lot, without any apparent remorse, I already felt unsure about contrition and uncertain in my firm purpose of amendment – the two preconditions of absolution. Having been away from Linda long enough for yearning and ...”

“... As a boy, Robert Duncan had a recurring dream. He would imagine himself in the middle of a treeless field. The ripe grass rippled, though there was no wind, and the light, as he later remembered, ‘was everywhere’, though there was no sun to be seen. Seeing himself in the centre of a circle of children, all of them singing and playing ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’, Duncan understood that he was ‘it’: ‘the Chosen One … a “King” or victim of the children’s round dance ...”

“... his early forties, has become a barrister, is married to the selfless Mary, and has two children, Robert and Thomas. Eleanor, Patrick’s mother, has had a stroke, and is immobilised and nearly speechless in a nursing home. But before her decline she was able to stiff her son one last time, by bequeathing the family home in the South of France to a devious ...”