“... sounds like it’s actually over, that’s probably because he decided early on not to let the fat lady out of her dressing room. Different Every Time, Marcus O’Dair’s fascinating authorised biography (Serpent’s Tail, £20), explains how much Wyatt had going for him at the outset and why the music is good. For a start there were his parents: his ...”

“... the absurd juxtapositions of Malevich’s ‘alogist’ works, such as Cow and Violin (1913). In Lady at the Advertising Column (1914), floating signs appear among colourful geometric forms that clearly prophesy Suprematism. There are premonitions, too, in Malevich’s designs for the avant-garde opera Victory over the Sun (1913). Here, much of the impulse ...”

“... they sit on the beach, Juan tells Chiron the story that gives the film its title. He knew an old lady in Cuba who said that ‘in moonlight black boys look blue.’ These words form the name of the unperformed play the film is based on, written early in his career by Tarell Alvin McCraney. McCraney suggests the piece was always on the way to being a ...”

“... but retired. In the new film, faced with the task of finding and disposing of the child of the lady in the casket, K says, ‘I never retired something that was born before.’ Soon he will find himself saying to his boss, ‘I feel a little strange telling childhood stories since I was never a child.’ But what if he was? What if his implanted memories ...”

“... the Salon, and indeed anticipates by a decade the huge success of Paul Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Gray.It is a relief to contemplate works of art in a church rather than a museum or a crowded exhibition hall, and especially in Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, a masterpiece of 19th-century architecture, or Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which, though classed as a ...”

“... have made of the image.Lilith also fascinated the Pre-Raphaelites. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith, she is an auburn-haired beauty admiring her image in a mirror, surrounded by roses and poppies. Rossetti wrote a sonnet to accompany the painting, where she is the ‘witch he [Adam] loved before the gift of Eve’, absorbed in her own ...”

“... offence, not a civil one, however, and carries a term of imprisonment.The Conservative minister Lady Williams told the House of Lords that these provisions were aimed at ‘the sorts of tactic we saw from Insulate Britain last autumn’ (when they blocked the M25 and other major roads). We can trust the police to enforce them proportionately, she ...”

“... Carey’s excremental vision (here’s mud in your eye) gets blurred: ‘Cracking-packing like a lady’. Not much of a wise-cack. Can anything be trusted? Perhaps Anon (it is hard to check) really ended his ‘Ancient Mariner’ with the lines A sadder and later man     I rose the morrow morn, but it would have been wiser of her or him not perversely ...”

“... for sale in the back pages of Sotheby’s catalogues. There is also a wonderful description of the lady who sold him a pup – in this case, a dining-table. Fate does not forgive. A few months later the artful vendeuse was found in her own garage, headless, handles footless and run over five or six times by her own car. It was strongly rumoured, Dirk ...”

“... to his later creation of elaborate works of art. His best feats perhaps are his killing of Lady Agatha, the suffragette, and of the ancient vicar, bumped off out of dynastic sequence because Louis decides his being so boring qualifies him for early dismissal. Agatha is distributing leaflets from a flying balloon. Louis punctures it with a shot from a ...”

“... for a school assignment. It was my mother. That can’t be my mother. Here was this vastly old lady Facing the camera unsmiling. My mother’s blue-eyed schizophrenia plus electroshock Had always kept her lovely skin unlined. The unlined woman of my memory and fantasy apparently Had turned into a raisin while I wasn’t looking, That I too must be ...”

“... to enjoy her journey’s fruits. She resents the Australian press labelling her as ‘the camel lady’ – which is a bit much when she insists so vigorously on reminding us that she is a woman, after all. Early on she laments the National Geographic sponsorship, wherewith ‘I’d sold a great swatch of my freedom and most of the trip’s integrity for ...”

“... he was examining the records of Zululand in 1881 that he came across a most improbable figure, Lady Florence Dixie, a reporter from the Morning Post. She is the key to this book, in the sense that it treats Late Victorian England as if it were an extension of the Dark Continent, wreathed in tribal loyalties and ritualised codes, made more vivid still by ...”

“... revelation in the book is that he had what must, I suppose, be called a ‘relationship’ with a lady, Margaret MacEwen, for over thirty years, and that nobody knew about it (though Margaret suspected that Gunn’s wife had her suspicions). Margaret has allowed this to be known and is quoted on this extraordinary situation. Not only did they meet ...”

“... go on with the show. This is generally seen as a heroic gesture, in line with the legend of lady-like sanctity that has grown up around Grenfell’s memory, but to me it sounds unattractively bossy, in the worst manner of Edwina Currie. To be forbidden to eat sweets in the theatre is surely an encroachment on civil liberties ... I prefer the kind of ...”