“... at his Surrey establishment, Cherkley Court, and there would open the interconnecting door between her bedroom and his in the hope that she would signify consent by leaving it ajar. Once, when he was talking about a woman with whom he (rightly) suspected Pincher was having an affair, he ‘puckered his face into a leery smile’ and declared: ‘I bet she’s ...”

“... When the Archduchess Joanna of Austria made her official entry into Florence on 16 December 1565 as the bride of Francesco de’ Medici, one of the first things she saw, at the gate of the city, was a painting showing the famous artists of Tuscany. In the distance was Cimabue holding a small lantern, and nearby Giotto with a larger lantern, surrounded by his immediate followers; towards the foreground there were two groups of 15th-century artists, and finally, at the very front and in the full light of day, Michelangelo and his companions, the great masters of the modern period from Leonardo da Vinci to the immediate past ...”

“... every version of The Dunciad, the Goddess Dulness visits Georgian London and views with delight ‘her private Academy for Poets’ where, in a cave next to ‘the Magnific College of Bedlam’, modern bards incubate their strange creations. It is a dark place of nightmarish fecundity: Here she beholds the Chaos dark and deep, Where nameless Somethings in ...”

“... once Europe’s most famous dwarf. There was some confusion about what happened to the body after her early death: it had been sold, or stolen; there were conflicting accounts. What is certain is that Caroline Crachami died in 1824, and that her skeleton is now on display in the Hunterian Museum in London. Cabinets full of ...”

“... the years since George V changed the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha into the House of Windsor in 1917. Her method, already perfected in her unauthorised and unflattering biographies of Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan, is to write bestsellers that take what she describes as ‘an unblinking look’ at their subjects – which ...”

“... have been lost. She has fought when she should have waited for as long as she could. She has shown her old ‘unilateralist’ contempt for United Nations intercession. She has made it even easier than before for there to be wars. She has lost a fair part of her support in the world. But it is true that such a settlement ...”

“... 2. Jim’s Dance Now Jim lives in squalor with his former wife, or thinks he does. He never sees her any more, unless she is furious, or pregnant, and even then she uses her hand as a veil when they pass one another in the hall. Jim doesn’t mind. He thinks of these meetings as the steps of a dance he’s learning, where ...”

“... a Scouse Tory who acknowledges the continuing unfairness of public school education while knowing her party will do nothing to alleviate it.24 January. ‘Well, love, the call’s going on’ is what my mother used to say in the early 1960s when I phoned from London, meaning that telephoning to them was still a luxury. On the rare occasions when I was at home ...”

“... nobody sings the word “hunger” like I do. Or the word “love”,’ Billie Holiday says in her memoir Lady Sings the Blues (written in 1956 with William Dufty and now reissued). Like Kafka’s hunger artist, Holiday let song make a spectacle of her deprivation. ‘I don’t need a friend/My heart is broken, it ...”

“... My Lady’s Fingertips Her long red fingernails have gone Down the kitchen sink and drain, But varnished and scarlet they’ll reappear    At the close of this campaign, Encircling, as of old, my heart And glasses of champagne To live happily ever after    The close of this campaign. And to mark the spot where now I see A horrible chilblain I’ll set a stone from Cartier’s    At the close of this campaign ...”

“... capeEmbossed with intricacy – with what postureThe wearer had to stand to let it drapeOver her upper torso – what it cost her,And yet what pay-off in jaw-dropping glamour(Drop-dead gorgeous through the ages, damn her.)‘This unique covering for the upper bodyWas buried with a ...”

“... his biography of 1921, he could only wonder at the disparity between the ‘dazzled imagination of her subjects’ and the unimaginative woman who had somehow inspired them. While ‘Victoria soared aloft towards the regions of divinity through a nimbus of purest glory,’ as Strachey put it, no one appeared to realise how inadequate she was to ...”

“... on film of people who won’t be around much longer, or who have already died. Landscape, her exhibition at the newly expanded Royal Academy (until 12 August), begins with a scene of snow-covered mountains, The Montafon Letter, 12 feet high and 24 feet wide, done in chalk on nine blackboards joined together. Despite its scale and photorealistic ...”

“... with all the stifling force of old, status-obsessed New York society. And yet, much as he wants her, Newland does not exactly want the married Countess Olenska to be his ‘mistress’. We know that he has had a secret mistress in the past (‘poor silly Mrs Thorley Rushworth’), before his relationship with May, and he knows what clandestine squalor it ...”