“... 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 ...”

“... from Symi. They’d had to climb the island’s 328-foot rockface to get to safety. ‘The old lady kept pleading with me for water,’ Fadia said. ‘“Just give me a tiny drop,” she’d say. And I had to say: “Sorry, we don’t even have a teaspoonful.”’ ‘After we’d been there five hours in the boiling heat, we managed to wave down a passing ...”

“... various ladylike adaptations of Eastern philosophies; later the pro-Fascist Jorian Jenks joined Lady Eve Balfour’s Soil Association as well as Kinship in Husbandry, started by the enthusiast for early Nazism Rolf Gardiner; Kathleen Raine converted from a modernist poet to found the Temenos Academy (current patron the Prince of Wales), with its Ten Basic ...”

“... of poems, often seems obsessed by the vis inertiae: ‘Mariana in the Moated Grange’, the Lady of Shalott pointlessly weaving, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, ‘Tithonus’, the endlessly dozing kraken which self-destructs as soon as it tries to do anything. I can’t come up with a Tennyson poem that doesn’t seem to glance at procrastination, aside from ...”

“... and a seductress and a schizophrenic to boot.) And what of Katerina Lvonava Ismailova, the ‘Lady Macbeth of Mitensk’, who, though initially less seducing than seduced, having once got the hang of fornication likes it so much that she strangles her husband and poisons her father-in-law (with mushrooms) rather than give it up? Such a plethora of ...”

“... costumes and sets – as if it were looking for a slot between Young Sherlock Holmes and My Fair Lady – it has an edge which is entirely contemporary in two senses. It belongs to the actual life of the men in question, not their legacy, and it speaks to concerns of the 21st century, where science looks more like magic every day. What sparks the ...”

“... of a stage shepherd to play the pastoral lover. One of the finest portraits is that of Teresa, Lady Shirley, painted in Rome in 1622. The daughter of a Christian Circassian chieftain, she had married Robert Shirley in Persia and is shown draped in a kind of tent of gold fabric – the effect of her clothes is splendidly exotic. Her thin-lipped, quizzical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her pursuers in the Mattel building, she finds herself in a secret apartment where a kind old lady, played by Rhea Perlman, offers her a cup of tea. She says her name is Ruth, and we later learn that she is the ghost of somebody who has been dead for years. Mattel created this apartment for her because she was Ruth Handler, who invented the Barbie Doll in ...”

“... is hard to understand. 17 January. The Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker-Bowles come to The Lady in the Van. Normally royalty is guaranteed to put a frost on an audience but their presence peps things up and it’s a very good house. This is because, unlike most royal persons, the Prince of Wales actually laughs and loudly too and so gets the audience ...”

“... beloved of readers and worshipped by his friends; James was 41, known mainly for The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller, examples of the ‘international theme’ he’d mined with such singularity. He was a solitary figure, an arch-stylist who appeared to live as a ghost in the varnished rooms of his own sensibility. ‘Singleness consorts much better with ...”

“... out. I never wore the coat again, though we did smoke the dope. Being grown up and behaving like a lady were the main words of advice my mother had had for me on the way from Brighton to North London. Not such bad advice from someone for whom every new meeting held the possibility of ‘getting somewhere’. A marriage proposal – for her or me, it didn’t ...”