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“... held in a cell below the tide line. His cell fills up with seawater twice a day, leaving only a foot of air in which to breathe. His jailer, Pobjoy, brings him scraps of tattered parchment, on which he paints clichéd ‘scenes of bucolick bliss’. Pobjoy sells the paintings for his own profit, but Gould hoards enough of the materials to write his illegal ...”

“... Nancy met and married Waldorf Astor, who owned the Observer and was MP for Plymouth; his brother John owned the Times. The Astors were so rich that occasionally it embarrassed her: ‘My dear what do you think Mr Astor’ – her father-in-law William, later the first Lord Astor – ‘has done,’ she wrote to Phyllis. ‘Don’t breathe it even to Reggie ...”

“... Unity. A visitor to Swinbrook, the family home, reported that the second anyone put their foot through the door, Decca and Unity would appear, demanding: ‘Are you a Fascist or a Communist?’ When this particular guest answered, ‘Neither – I’m a democrat,’ they sniffed in unison, ‘How wet!’ and wandered off. Interestingly, after the ...”

“... humour was born in the trenches. Oscar Wilde’s clever formulations no longer sufficed. The five-foot-two eyes-of-blue Charleston danced by the ‘It’ generation required a leg position as awkward as the knock-kneed pose of Nijinsky’s corps de ballet. The madcap crazes of the 1920s, the frenetic club culture and the incidence of social deviance were a ...”

“... it is a mixture of Frank Auerbach and a painter who used to show at Helen Lessore [Gallery] called John Bratby – Lucian’s work seems to be just a display of technique.’ I can’t help thinking he was referring particularly to the portrait of Susanna with two whippets.Susanna lived with her husband, Alexander Chancellor, and their two daughters. She and ...”

“... control their own fate: ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that ...”

“... radio. Indeed, the onset of television pushed a lot of well-known radio announcers onto the back foot, and several struggled to make the move. Some who did, such as Gilbert Harding (another Cambridge graduate and former schoolteacher, later a famously agitated contestant on What’s My Line?), were known for their melancholy and their loneliness as well as ...”

“... face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The children are so horrid: have ...”

“... had a bad stammer, and his puns were delivered with effort, after a period of voiceless struggle. John Clare described him approaching ‘a joke or a pun with an inward sort of utterance ere he can give it speech till his tongue becomes a sort of Packmans strop turning it over and over till at last it comes out wetted as keen as a razor.’ De Quincey ...”

“... of his People, is also busy organising a system of defence to match his pledge that ‘not one foot of Romanian territory shall pass into the hands of our enemies.’ He has been touring the country, making speeches to rally his subjects to the task of building a great moat, 36 feet deep, on the border with Soviet Russia. Running parallel with the River ...”

“... remained unpublished until 1534. It caused outrage among keen Arthurians, as shown for instance by John Leland’s furious Assertio inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae of 1544, in which he insisted that the whole Arthurian legend was absolutely true, listed the 149 knights of the Round Table to prove it, wrote Polydore off as a damn ...”

“... John Singer Sargent has often been accused of lacking a soul. Even Henry James, who helped introduce him to the London scene in the 1880s and continued to promote his work, worried that he suffered from a ‘sort of excess of cleverness’. The fact that Sargent catered to a transatlantic clientele of celebrities and nouveaux riches at the height of the Gilded Age only encouraged the imputations of superficiality ...”

“... gathered and the guests stood up to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Then came the carving of a three-foot-square cake embossed with a likeness in icing of the poet’s head, his cautious smile carried on layers of sponge in blue and yellow stripes, two of the four colours of the island’s flag, blue for the sea and yellow for sunshine. St Lucia likes to remind ...”

“... beloved of today’s builders. During the Gezi protests, I noticed a teenager rubbing with his foot the meringue façade of a mall which covered what once had been a perfectly beautiful hundred-year-old building. He kicked it and some of the white stuff broke off, like dried icing sugar from a gingerbread house. What is Erdogan doing? It’s easy to hate ...”

“... Anne Dick. That year’s programme included studying 75 Elizabethan plays; Anne, who didn’t set foot on this Mount Athos, was told to read Troilus and Cressida and post her comments. Lowell returned them with tart annotations. ‘I loved being mocked so wittily,’ she reported. Why did they go along with it? ‘My picture of our friendship is of Aesop’s ...”