“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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?’ ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... housewives – anybody with whom they thought they could come to an arrangement. Many married white girls, even though they might already have young brides back home in Mirpur. They drank, ate meat that wasn’t halal, and only rarely went to the East London Mosque on Commercial Road, which had been established in 1941. They were living in that tough but ...”

“... that Sandd put through his door after he resigned, advertising his job: a picture of four smiling white people in Sandd blue, striding down the road with light sheaves of paper, grinning. ‘Keep busy outdoors, in charge of your own time,’ it read. ‘Ideal for students, housewives and pensioners.’ He showed me a day’s work from just after ...”

“... after the election, Aaron Sorkin’s rant on the Vanity Fair website: ‘The Klan won last night. White nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons … misogynistic shitheads everywhere … If he does manage to be a douche nozzle without breaking the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years.’ Or consider the message read out to Vice ...”

“... set the bar for ‘good business’. On 15 and 16 September he bypassed his two major dealers (White Cube and Gagosian) and auctioned 223 pieces of new work directly at Sotheby’s. The sale beat its already sky-high estimates by a substantial margin, bringing a total of £111.5 million, ten times the old record for a single-artist auction, set by Picasso ...”