“... Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Teresa of Avila, Marie of the Incarnation and Madame Guyon – what could overlap more completely with my interests? Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David ...”

“... his membership of the Order of the Templars, and on his death-bed is covered with their uniform of white cloak and red cross. Even death itself does not obliterate him from the world of men: his body is carried in a great cortège down river to London, there to become fit subject for an edifying sermon, and his burial is the occasion for a funeral feast for ...”

“... He knows far too much about music to believe that the musical canon is, like the literary one, a white male bourgeois fraud, and the second subject of his transgressive sonata is, roughly, the experience of music in solitude, of private performance and properly creative listening. This is far more interesting, and it establishes the right of Said’s book to ...”

“... his notes: ‘And are you still drinking two bottles of wine a day?’ Some of the best things in Richard Klein’s brilliant, wayward book Eat Fat* are about the way in which the medical profession rushes after certain facts and conclusions while phlegmatically ignoring others. The medical received wisdom which particularly gets his goat is to do with the ...”

“... nuclear strategy, and would, we are given to understand, have gone all the way to the top, to be a Richard Perle or a Paul Nitze (though likely to have been more liberal than either) if he had stuck at it. However, ‘Ithiel didn’t make a big public career, he wasn’t a team player.’ All the same, he still walks the corridors of power: ‘He took on such ...”

“... keeping’. Bishop Wordsworth, great-nephew of the poet, is commemorated by George Frampton in white marble, supine, fingers intertwined as though sleeping off a heavy lunch. He is almost as dead as the supposedly living figures painted by Frampton’s son, Meredith, now in the Tate’s collection. They are minutely detailed simulacra of humans that look ...”

“... plays and novels were eventually translated into 30 languages, and he knew everyone from Richard Strauss to Walther Rathenau. He even persuaded Mussolini to reduce a friend’s prison sentence. But though he courted the famous and the powerful, he insisted on his own indifference to politics. The account in his autobiography of his experiences during ...”

“... the follies that flourished at hot springs, he was challenged by a fleshy, domineering figure in a white beaver hat, who demanded to know by what authority he was preaching. Wesley’s retort (or so he claimed) was ‘Pray, sir, are you a justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ ...”

“... and turned a blind eye to his affairs with women as diverse as Marilyn Monroe, a 19-year-old White House intern and an East German spy). He also understood the power of television: both Truman and Eisenhower had appeared on the small screen, but Kennedy loved the camera and it loved him back. He was a politician who literally lived and died on film. But ...”

“... theatre, for instance: in his 1878 Royal Academy showpiece, he cast the supposed murder victims of Richard III as two pretty, tremulous schoolboys poised on a dungeon’s downward-winding stair, their spotlit heads peering into the darkness confronting them, hands anxiously linking, blond chevelures merging into one. The casting, the lighting and the face and ...”

“... friends climbed over the walls of the inaccessible estate to be photographed, all of them wearing white masks, beside it. Woodward does not include the Broken Column – perhaps because it took a posse of Surrealists to grasp its weirdness. Ruins pull our responses in two directions. They offer concrete evidence, of the architectural orders of classical ...”

“... also to have his children brought into the world with teeth, after the manner of Richard III’. Bowes seems not to have minded claiming the child (‘a small price to pay’, Moore decides, ‘for the spectacular fortune he now possessed’). The other children were sent away to various schools. He obliged Mary to send cutting notes to her ...”

“... Cakes of Gooseberry Lady Barrington’s Way’, or ‘Lady Arundel’s Manchet’ (manchet is white bread made from fine flour). But there is a complicated relationship with social hierarchy here: alongside these over-the-shoulder forms of aristocratic verification jostles a commitment to distribution – a paradox caught neatly in Partridge’s recipe ...”

“... to Darling. In 1972 Vogue ran a full-page portrait of Darling, Curtis and Holly Woodlawn by Richard Avedon. Darling held a heart-shaped lollipop emblazoned with the words LOVE ME. The high point of her career came when she was cast in Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings. Williams thought Darling was ‘marvellous to work with … a disciplined ...”

“... whom was a priest”, in his own house, is rather too much for my modesty,’ Byron had written to Richard Hoppner, the British consul, earlier in the year. But that was exactly what he proceeded to do. Palazzo Guiccioli, the count’s elegant neoclassical residence in the heart of the city, became his home until he left for Pisa in October 1821. In February ...”