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“... called Helen Maldon, who strikes out on her own when she is abandoned by her hot-headed husband, George Talboys. Helen leaves her baby son with her father, changes her name to Lucy Graham and becomes a governess. Soon she escapes from the ‘dull slavery’ of her job by becoming the trophy wife of the elderly Sir Michael Audley and the mistress of his ...”

“... the strokes are as simple in their effect, and as hard to imitate, as the stroke that hits a ball squarely and directs it just where you want it to go, and the moment probably as pleasurable. For him, as for Manet, Sargent, Whistler and other near contemporaries, Velázquez was the master.What must have made Nicholson’s small oils enjoyable to paint ...”

“... as the Earl of Chesterfield said, ‘he was taken by many at a distance for a gilt garland.’ George Brummell, an equally famous beau of a later day, would have thought that irredeemably vulgar. Yet Bath, a city in the ascendant, needed someone like Nash. When the 18th century came in it was half spa, half pleasure resort. The haut ton found Tunbridge ...”

“... worked as an accountant in Java in the 1920s. One night, he claimed, he had gone for a walk when a ball of brilliant light fell on his head. This happened to him every evening for some years and, he said, opened him to ‘the connection between the Divine Power that fills the whole universe and the human soul’. By the 1950s, he had come to the attention of ...”

“... movie versions of the book weight the girls’ stories. Of the eight film interpretations, George Cukor’s version in 1933 is crazy for Katharine Hepburn’s Jo; Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 take seemed to me to lean (weepily) towards Claire Danes’s Beth; only Gerwig’s has time and space for Amy, played by Florence Pugh. Though maybe I’m overdoing ...”

“... In the late 1960s, George Bush Jr was at Yale, branding the asses of pledges to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity with a hot coathanger. Michel Foucault was at the Societé française de philosophie, considering the question, ‘What is an author?’ The two, needless to say, never met. Foucault may have visited Texas on one of his lecture tours, but Junior, as far as it is known, never took his S&M revelry beyond the Ivy League – novelists will have to invent a chance encounter in a basement club in Austin ...”

“... of Britain’s third party. The man who at one moment seemed set to inherit the mantle of Lloyd George became instead a kind of gruesome ghost haunting any Liberal feast. The reason was quite simple. In the days when such things were hardly spoken of, Thorpe was accused – first by rumour and then via a more formal judicial process – of having been ...”

“... other forms of discourse, and that they can be treated in other ways, we may turn to the Hungarian George Konrad. His earlier book The Case Worker has been highly praised, but I have not seen it. The City Builder, presented as fiction, is not a novel in any ordinary sense. It is not easily definable as anything else either: in fact, one would be tempted to ...”

“... thereby bringing individual meaning to the experience? Or would he have deliberately ballooned the ball over the crossbar, thereby defining himself through negative action? And what would he have made of that old Romantic bourgeois Hamish McAlpine, the Dundee United keeper who used to take all of his side’s penalties whenever one was awarded during regular ...”

“... African American artists: Norman Lewis, Charles Alston and Selma Burke) and finally to the George Washington Carver School, where he was mentored by Charles White, whose paintings – among them, Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man) and Hope for the Future – constitute an archive of what he called ‘images of dignity’. I like to think of DeCarava’s ...”

“... of a frieze of men in black opera hats and a few leggy girls in bright fancy dress, Masked Ball at the Opera (1873), kicks off Faces in the Crowd: Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today, at the Whitechapel until 6 March. The last rooms in the exhibition show photographs, pictures, videos and projections made in the last couple of years – for ...”

“... was the first child and eldest daughter of the future fifth earl of Leicester, later an equerry to George VI, and his wife, Elizabeth Yorke, daughter of the eighth earl of Hardwicke. The first chapter of Lady in Waiting, covering her ‘idyllic’ early childhood, in which the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were often brought over to play, is entitled ...”

“... the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers. He was in the private sitting room of Number Ten when Ramsay MacDonald returned from the palace on resigning. He belonged to Chamberlain’s magic circle of ...”

“... in what is today Turkey, by al-Jazari. The little mechanical man was supposed to pick up a ball every hour and drop it into a dragon’s mouth. Saladin (who died in 1193) would hardly have been the right model for this rather menial job. (Incidentally, this ‘portrait of Saladin’ has done the rounds and features in quite a number of popular ...”

“... rather than restrict it. A sentence like ‘It was to be the last Royal Pavilion Midsummer Ball until the peace’ holds out (from our point of view) a reasonable expectation of resumption, while for people at the time it meant the indefinite and very likely permanent suspension of the life they had known. When the first fifty-kilogramme bomb is ...”