“... which one of you is Mrs Bloyard?’ snaps a moustachioed French police inspector to a shingled lady and a man in a Charvet scarf. Wimples, however, are only worn by males, who must also be untidily clad in tweed jackets and grey flannels. Baxter’s art may not prove able to resist for much longer the critic’s urge to interpret and to categorise. All ...”

“... girls are purported to be the wildest. Add to this a prim, chaste mother who lives with a pious lady companion; a father who makes brief dazzling appearances and who is the personification of ‘debonair’; and an Aunt Bunch who takes drugs and ‘goes about with Negroes’ (a vile body indeed). Bursting with sap, like a liana on an over-mown lawn, Wyndham ...”

“... near the hotel recorded the names of several men who had fallen climbing. ‘The mountain,’ the lady wrote, sitting on the balcony of the hotel, ‘is a symbol ... ’ She paused. She could see the topmost height through her glasses. She focused the lens, as if to see what the symbol was. She was writing to her elder sister in Birmingham. The balcony ...”

“... are told – but what’s the difference? The plot is straightforward police-procedural: grand old lady is battered to death in Belgravia, dogged but unusually imaginative policeman works his way through the half a dozen or so sure-fire suspects, and gets a bit of help on the side from our hero, a ruminative, world-weary ex-spy called Humphrey Leigh. But as a ...”

“... Perhaps he should retreat to Ireland and safety? A priest offers him assistance from the Our Lady of Knock Fund for Reverse Emigration. But he continues his quest. There are a great many ingenious plots here interlaced, and the book in general supports the learned opinion of Angelica, which is that romance avoids the fate of ‘classic’ narrative ...”

“... which has a spare paddock or two and a bridleway, you are likely to meet strings of ponies or a lady rider who will nod down agreeably to pedestrians and offer a living illustration of de haut en bas and even of noblesse oblige. No amount of social levelling can remove the fact that you have to look up to a woman on a horse. Cobbett said the best way to see ...”

“... they are faced with a mother carrying her dead child, or a woman with a pram, or an unarmed old lady in pince-nez. On Vakulinchuk’s body, when it is displayed at the harbour, is a sign saying ‘Killed for a plate of soup’, an elliptical summary of the revolt itself, which started with an almost Surrealist argument about whether the worms in the rotting ...”

“... João is afraid he might be the son of a carpenter or a thief. But then a mysterious lovely lady shows up – his mother, of course, mostly locked away in her mansion and constantly abused by her brutal husband, the Count of Santa Barbara. This man, needless to say, is not João’s father, and neither is Father Dinis, although that’s the obvious ...”

“... football games – roughs up a young man with strong political connections, threatens an old lady by tearing her oxygen tube out, bullies a football player into throwing a game, and crosses over to the real dark side by selling police information to a top drug dealer. Nothing but trouble is heading his way, and all of it arrives. Somewhere in his ...”

“... he went on to paint writers (Pope, Steele, Prior), aristocrats (the Marquess of Rockingham, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) and doctors (Richard Mead, Sir Hans Sloane). But he turned down an offer to be the King’s Painter because he objected to ‘the slavery of court dependence’. His writings on art were read widely (his Essay on the Theory of ...”

“... Erasmus and the printer Froben, although they too are on the verge of smiling. The drawing of Lady Guildford is unusual; she does pucker up and give a sly look towards her husband, but in the painting she looks ahead and her smile has gone. So while glumness and grim and nervous looks were common in Holbein’s portraits they were also avoidable. Some ...”

“... of Jacob); the Lovers attributed to Titian, the Correggio Holy Family, the Bronzino Portrait of a Lady in Green, the two paintings by Gentileschi – A Sibyl is the other one – and his daughter Artemisia’s self-portrait. Without these the exhibition would be significant; with them it is magnificent. As well as paintings there are rooms of drawings. A ...”

“... but its destruction was, he said, ‘an act of vandalism’ on a scale rare outside wartime. Lady Churchill had form. She had put her foot through a preparatory sketch by Sickert. When the sculptor David McFall, whose bust was the last image of Churchill taken from life, met her, she told him what she had done to the Sutherland, adding ...”

“... the place and she isn’t wearing any gloves. The year is 1884 – could she be any less like a lady? Mycroft decides instantly that Enola needs to go to a finishing school, and she sees this as a good reason to escape to London in search of her mother. On the train she meets another runaway, a young man who happens to be the missing marquess, and the plot ...”

“... stories of a politician who resembles Hitler and a singer who resembles both Britney Spears and Lady Gaga. The rest of the images described above are from The Brutalist, Corbet’s most recent film. The hero is an architect trained at the Bauhaus, and a couple of chairs by Mies van der Rohe have strong cameo roles in the movie. It’s clear that all three ...”