“... novel about magic in the new age of science. Real people, from Newton to Swift, Handel, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mrs Manley, mingled with imaginary ones, not least the eponymous narrator of the title him/herself, a time-traveller from a late-20th-century mental hospital who switches gender in the process. Acts of Mutiny is equally ...”

“... headquarters in New York, and was taken in with an interpreter to see a youngish, whitish Chinese lady, who was the Deputy-Prime Minister of the Kirghizi Republic. After we had discussed her goats at home, the excellence of her walnuts, and the fact that her district grew the most tasty apricots in the world, she came to the point. Fourteen times, she told ...”

“... fell on the house when Rex Harrison described Diana the man-eater as ‘a bitch’, but the old lady laughed heartily, and the audience followed her. ‘You never said “bitch” in front of a lady in those days,’ reminisced one of the actors. No doubt that made an evening at the theatre all the more ...”

“... aghast at the antics of ‘Snow Snifters’. Much later, dining with pop stars in Cheyne Walk, Lady Diana Cooper would mention that, in her day, post-prandial cocaine was served in salt-cellars. Hoare’s wartime London is a stage across which a troupe of affluent, cosmopolitan hipsters parade their unorthodoxy: the artist, drug addict, bisexual and ...”

“... about his famous brother, the movie actor, and his famous stage-fall. Like these others, Munro’s lady is caught in her provincialism of soul; but she is at the same time caught in the act of trying to escape provincialism. Her boast is both a sign of ordinariness and a longing to throw off ordinariness. Writers like Munro and Pritchett see the managed ...”

“... to the police, should anyone wish to see them.) MacArthur selects protests arising from the Lady Chatterley trial and the cannabis laws, refreshing inclusions both, but he also includes criticism of the clothes women wear at the opera. The book’s strict chronology means that John Pilger’s ‘Year Zero’ is followed by a ‘protest’ by ...”

“... place in the land of Catita, where Jackanapes flies with his tail in his mouth, to seek out a lady as white as snow and as red as blood?’ Jack is dead. The character who speaks to Eumenides here, and asks to be taken into his service, is the grateful ghost of a poor man for whose burial Eumenides, although a stranger and mere passer-by, had earlier and ...”

“... and Eva Le Gallienne in the United States. Even the ageing superstar Sarah Bernhardt appeared in Lady from the Sea in 1906. Meanwhile another set of directors and actors turned to Ibsen for quite different reasons. The young Aurélien Lugné-Poe hated naturalism and devised a new theatrical idealism that revelled in high poetic meaning and rarefied ...”

“... Bush is clearly the better man these days, even if he looks as clueless as the Channel 5 weather lady. The Blair/Bush press conference was revealing. The press, in this instance two members of the British press, laid into Bush, not like our boys here do. You could see the sneer starting to take shape in the corner of his mouth, but he’d left the smirk at ...”

“... to carry out a pictorial survey of Greek monuments in what was then Turkish territory; ‘and as lady Elgin possessed a taste for drawing’, a 19th-century source informs us, her husband ‘wished to know whether he would engage to assist her in decorating fire-screens, work-tables, and other such elegancies’. Complaining of the paltry salary on ...”

“... about his fitness for the part. You can guess the sensitivities stirring in his lofty remarks to Lady Blessington about authors of modest background making their ‘awkward efforts’ to ‘act the fine gentleman’. Gilmour chooses some telling anecdotes. At Cambridge, for example, Byron was evidently eager to play the lord and wore magnificent robes; but ...”

“... from the saga of the Berlusconi divorce was briefly on offer thanks to the Italian-born first lady of France, and the nude portrait of her up for auction in Berlin. With so much going on at home to occupy them, the Italian press haven’t found a great deal of room to cover such dowdy scandals as who paid for the clearing of whose moat in ...”

“... exists between two worlds, one to be accounted for in the dialect of common sense: the middle-aged lady opening a bookshop in East Anglia, the independent yet amenable, life-loving girls to be found in nearly all the books; and the other world, subject to incursions of supernatural evil, in the form of the appalling damp in the offices in ‘The Axe’, the ...”

“... Is this a crime scene? A collage? I looked for an explanation but there isn’t one. The First Lady of Ohio and Ronk’s Towing are thanked for their help. The visitor is then taken along a walkway between a full-scale Afghan heroin lab and a Colombian cocaine-processing plant. An audio recording plays from somewhere inside each, in that tricky way ...”

“... to beg the nation’s approval. Now that her mother is gone, the Queen has become the National Old Lady, and the papers have become busy inventing new forms of subjection to her heavenly qualities and brand new typefaces in which to express it. People who want to understand how the Windsors turned to politics – and how New Labour politicians turned to the ...”