“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Records of Woman (1828) would have recognised in Ella Stuart’s name the legendary figure of Lady Arabella Stuart. Prevented by James I, her cousin, from living with her commoner husband, Arabella Stuart feigned illness to stay a short time at the East Barnet house which was Landon’s childhood home from 1809 to 1815 (when it was known as Trevor ...”

“... world, of herself and of her relationship with her husband. Ferdinand and Isabella were knight and lady and her devotion to St Michael was to the master of an order of ‘angelic chivalry’. The Granada War – which Liss insists was ‘the Queen’s war’ – was not so much a crusade as a knightly adventure, in which the warriors were inspired by fear of ...”

“... to a bomb dropped on London in, precisely, 1940. By what he calls ‘a curious coincidence’ and Lady Bracknell would call carelessness, he lost both his parents, too, in the same raid, though to a separate bomb on a different part of London. By the time of the story’s action he is an expatriate, living and working – for a chocolate firm – in ...”

“... home opinion would be slow to stir on such a matter. But the test of marriage was whether the lady would be acceptable at the dinner tables of Camberley. It was the closer and more frequent contact with middle-class England through the steamer and furlough that progressively raised the sex barrier, not some mysterious mystique of empire. Two social groups ...”

“... backed with playing cards: sometimes the face of the card is left visible so a picture of a court lady or melancholy lover has a couple of hearts on the reverse – a little secret between the limner and his sitter.Hilliard’s standard fee for a portrait miniature was £3 (around £500 in modern money), though a fancy locket, jewelled setting or ivory case ...”