“... pet name, if they have one: so you get two Berties (Edward VII and George VI), Georgie (George V), David (Edward VIII) and Lilibet. When it gets to the Windsors’ foreign cousins there are Willi, Nicky, Charlie (of Norway), Foxy (of Bulgaria), Missy and Mignon. The joke was exploited long ago in Cecil Beaton’s spoof My Royal Past, though Tomlinson’s ...”

“... A recent Italian book on the films of David Lean is called Colour and Dust, and with an amplification or two the phrase offers a pretty good description of his later work. The colour is mainly orange, and a lot of the dust is sand, especially in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). More generally, of course, the phrase evokes the director of swirling epics, a sort of Cecil B ...”

“... he became an author,’ the social connotations of ‘mechanic’ must have grated. Like Dickens, David Copperfield owes his professional start to a ten-shilling shorthand manual: The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were ...”

“... when the British consul, who used to serve drinks to his Saudi guests, was shot dead by a drunken young prince. Since then alcohol has been banned completely, and high-living Saudis must indulge in their black-market whisky, along with their pirated ‘blue’ videos, in the privacy of their own apartments. There were no Saudis at the farewell party the ...”

“... Russell, studying in what he had understood to be a secular school, Marcus was indignant. And to a young man of his explosive temperament that meant trouble: trouble so serious that, as he tells his story, it becomes evident that he is already dead, killed by Chinese bayonets in South Korea. Roth’s young men often come ...”

“... Minneapolis, which appears in the section entitled ‘Strangers’. Humiston recalls when, as a young architecture student living in the Midwest, he decided to try his luck in New York, a city he knew only from a class field trip. Things begin unpropitiously, when Humiston develops severe diarrhoea while travelling on a Greyhound bus from Kalamazoo in the ...”

“... and, more violently, how much they loved the heavily lipglossed singer in a band called Japan. David Sylvian was his name. The girls called him David. So far as I remember, the diary was a pretty spectacular fantasia of adolescent lusts and local hatreds: Dear Katherine, David came ...”

“... feeling pessimistic about the outlook for the case. Even the fact that during her early years the young woman in question was becoming fluent in three languages besides her own, and reading assiduously and learning to write letters in an exquisite italic hand, scarcely counterbalances the accumulation of woes, or suggests that the sufferer might go on to ...”

“... to avert, and Lessing will be perfectly capable of remembering the name, for instance, of ‘the young woman’ who worked for her in 1997 and recalls how ‘pissed’ her employer was at the poor critical reception of the Canopus novels. Whether Lessing likes it or not, there is going to be more of the same. As Eve Bertelsen once pointed out, Lessing’s ...”

“... words, ‘to dress frilly people in colours that confuse the eye’, and appearing as a peevish young icon slouched on a chair with a moody, come-hither expression, a pure white cat on his lap and his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired ...”

“... chief whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably courageous thing to do. Macmillan never forgot it. Profumo then proceeded to enjoy a notably good war, serving first as an air intelligence liaison officer during the Battle of Britain, before seeing action in the battle of ...”

“... Michael Crick’s biography from 2022, some of his fellow pupils at Dulwich College remember the young Nigel being more hard-right than centre-right, closer to the National Front than he was even to the outer fringes of the Tory mainstream. They say he was a teenage racist. He says it was all schoolboy high jinks. Given that this was the late 1970s, it is ...”

“... selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end soon. He needs cash.Howard is knowledgeable about art. He’s a serious connoisseur and collector, an expert on Wenceslaus Hollar, the prolific 17th-century Bohemian printmaker. Among his inheritance is the ...”

“... is more to her than that. Her mother is the novelist Shena Mackay; her father was the art critic David Sylvester, though she thought of him as an ‘uncle’ until she was 21. She took life drawing classes at Morley College in the late 1980s, which brought her to the attention of Maggi Hambling. A garage belonging to Hambling served as her studio as she ...”

“... fingers stained the virulent yellowish green I’ve been sponging on during this last week. As a young man my father smoked quite heavily and his fingers were stained like this by cigarettes – and a nice brown it was, and one which I wouldn’t mind seeing on the wall; if he were alive still and the man he was when I was ten I could take him along to ...”