“... by 8.45 and a pizza (gluten-free) supper.13 January. We abandon any plans of going to Yorkshire as snow is forecast, some of our indecision to be put down to the over-dramatisation of the weather by the forecasters who, one feels, long to be part of the news not just the background to it. On the News reports of Tony Snowdon’s death. I first met him in 1968 ...”

“... painted either. He acquired a temporary patron in the form of a rich American widow called Margaret de Silver. He had book plans, rather English subjects, all: one on Dickens, one on music hall, one on prisons, but he was never that sort of jobbing writer. He lived for six months in 1928 in a shepherd’s cottage in Northumberland. He visited ...”

“... paper A voice is heard ‘coming out of blackness – the blackness all voices come from’: The snow had a crust, they said, like bread – only white – it held me up but it would not hold her she fell through it The black of mourning and the white of the swan create a scene that is the antithesis of Bishop’s many celebrations of the multi-hued – the ...”

“... I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain with private characters who, if not invented, were surely concealed like the author himself under ...”

“... against blood sports to attend Prince Charles’s wedding, while Orson gloats when Princess Margaret in her eagerness to see him cuts Peter Sellers. But are the rest of us any better? Perhaps the spate of books about, say, the Mitford family is also a symptom of an urge to become vicarious groupies, hobnobbers by proxy among the upper classes. You too ...”

“... the current blockbuster Dunkirk follow in this memorial tradition, as does the TV historian Dan Snow, when he advocates ‘augmented reality software’ to help us relive Passchendaele. These are national epics, reckonings wrought with all the latest resources of ‘full immersion’ – the equivalent of re-enacting the Passion of Christ in Seville’s ...”

“... shooting practice with a pistol inherited from her father. This plan, with its Mata-Hari-meets-Margaret-Rutherford quality, seems like wild novelistic invention but is attested in its essentials. Thomson understands that this might be the resurfacing in theatricalised form of Cahun’s wish for death, but also that self-destructive characters can be ...”

“... greatly encouraged from having seen last night a rough assembly of what has been shot so far, the snow scenes at Thame looking particularly good with no hint that these were filmed on the hottest day of the year. Nor had I anticipated the change-over to much more muted colours as the King’s madness takes hold, Kew (Thame Park) almost in black and white with ...”

“... later, Tina went to Somerville to read Spanish, and Maria to read Physiological Sciences at Lady Margaret Hall. In 1962, mother and son together enrolled on a language course in Córdoba. Three years later, Valpy went back to work at the same language school and found a letter from his mother, also applying for a job. ‘It was a startling moment for him: he ...”

“... When Mason performs his dying fall as a Byronic gunman, gate clutching, staggering across the snow towards the lights of the police cars, he is in Haggerston Park, E2. Another film, The Long Good Friday, arrived in 1979, so pertinent in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the ...”

“... days in summer, or, even better, by sledge in winter, when the frost has hardened the ruts and the snow has smoothed the way. It’s a lovely wooden building, not big by the standards of the gentry, one or perhaps two storeys, with a slightly too grand colonnaded portico over the door. It has a bath-house, perhaps a small formal garden, an orchard, a ...”

“... as they were when the phrase ‘jet set’ was first coined. Concorde was built to move Princess Margaret, Noël Coward, Grace Kelly and Ian Fleming around the world. It was built to carry them to Barbados for the winter, and to New York to go shopping; to Buenos Aires to watch the polo, and to South Africa to go on safari. Since this pattern of use for air ...”

“... Boyd also bore a ‘striking resemblance’ to an artist’s impression drawn up with the help of Margaret Hodgson, who saw a man and a skipping girl on Low Street shortly before 10 p.m. The police had found a photograph of Boyd taken in the early 1990s, sitting in an armchair, his left leg slung casually over his right. Wright showed the two images side by ...”

“... There were no planes: Armenia was at war with its neighbour Azerbaijan, and under blockade. Snow came through the ill-fitting windows of the sleeper as it trundled between steep little peaks. When we arrived in Yerevan the next morning it was still dark: the moon had set, and the city, starved of electricity, was blacked out. Only sparse dabs of ...”

“... nor English. Both start with a famous paragraph of notable beauty: depicting insomnia in Proust, snow descending on fire in Powell. The first-person singular occurs 15 times in Proust; in Powell, not once. All readers, anywhere, possess an ‘I’ and have experienced sleep or lack of it. No language besides English possesses a one-word equivalent of the ...”