“... Keynes, Robert Graves (a former pupil) and Rupert Brooke (a contemporary at Magdalene). Another friend, Lytton Strachey, was renowned for his obsession with Mallory’s good looks (he credited him ‘with the face of a Botticelli’). In April 1915, Mallory wrote to A.C. Benson, his former tutor: ‘there’s something indecent when so many friends have ...”

“... the bold, concentric circles of Kenneth Noland’s Number One, its verso inscribed, ‘To my friend Clem who has more to do with it than anybody’; Jules Olitski’s shifting colours; Anthony Caro’s decisively abstract steel sculptures. Karen Wilkin writes in the catalogue of his collection that Greenberg didn’t miss the art he sold, but surely he ...”

“... Lady​ Anne Glenconner has lived her life ‘in the shadow of the crown’. She is a friend of many members of the royal family and was, for thirty years, a lady in waiting to Princess Margaret. Her memoir, however, is written in the shadow of The Crown, ‘the popular Netflix series’ in which she was played by Nancy Carroll with Helena Bonham Carter as Margaret ...”

“... the childhood to the work. Sinclair reports that Caroline Blackwood was told ‘by a homosexual friend of Bacon’s that he had admitted to being systematically and viciously horsewhipped by the Irish grooms in front of the father he feared and loved’. Peppiatt, who uses the same source, writes: ‘If indeed his father, to whom he was sexually ...”

“... begun a short-lived residency at Manhattan’s Café Bizarre, when an already enormously famous Andy Warhol (and his canny manager, Paul Morrissey) arrived to offer them a deal. Warhol was in need of music. He, or Morrissey, seems to have known of the group through the overlap between the underground film world and the avant-garde musicians who worked as ...”

“... have to vote for me’. She won. Nearly four decades later, she still sits as a Labour MP.None of Andy Beckett’s other ‘searchers’ – stalwarts of the Labour left – does. Jeremy Corbyn is out of the party and won as an independent at the last election; John McDonnell had the whip suspended in July for voting against the new Labour government to scrap ...”

“... operas, at the triumphs and disasters of Wimbledon and the Olympics. He points out nicely that Andy Murray followed Kipling’s injunction to ‘treat those two impostors just the same’, which is inscribed over the entrance to the Centre Court, by weeping both when he lost and when he won. I share Dixon’s weak – or is it strong? – tear ducts. As he ...”

“... sexual rivalry arose. For instance, she backed a photograph she had taken of the wife of a close friend (later lover) with a nude one of herself before giving it to him. In order to obtain her photographs, she often misled and lied to her subjects, and all the more so if they were women. Several of them decribe how she would lie in wait for ...”

“... worked.) She was a member of the Clairemont Art Guild and did monoprints on weekends with her friend Frances, a wisecracking old dame in Capri pants and Simone de Beauvoir turban. Together they inked rollers, tore newsprint for collages and cut do-it-yourself mats while my mother declaimed on the subject of Turk’s husbandly misdeeds.* Frances, puffing ...”

“... Wyoming ranch. Barlow had been in San Francisco for the Summer of Love; he knew Andy Warhol and everyone at the Factory. Acid was his thing: he denounced cocaine as a Republican drug because it made its users selfish. John Kennedy went to Wyoming. ‘My first impression of him,’ Barlow wrote in his memoir, Mother American Night, ‘was ...”

“... by accident: I was standing in Broad Street in Oxford watching the Suez demonstration go by when a friend pulled me in.Today it’s bitterly cold, particularly since the march keeps stopping or is stopped by the police, who seem bored that they’ve got so little to do, the mood of the march overwhelmingly friendly and domestic and hardly political at ...”

“... reader’s power and pleasure. In Theroux’s My Secret History (1989), the protagonist was called Andy Parent, though he shared many characteristics and experiences with his author. An early section featured the alcoholic priest Father Furty, who recurs in Mother Land, though lacking his cardinal vice and apparently unfazed at now having spiritual ...”

“... little humility would help.Towards​ the end of 1826, Alexander Pushkin was playing chess with a friend who, as he put it, ‘knew a lot of the kinds of thing they study in universities while we were learning to dance’. The friend checkmated Pushkin with his knight and remarked: ‘Cholera morbus is at our borders, and ...”

“... poetry worlds, though he never achieved, or, by all accounts, desired, the celebrity and status of Andy Warhol or Claes Oldenburg or Jim Dine, alongside whose work his elegant collages were first presented to British gallery-goers at the Hayward’s Pop Art show of 1969. But Brainard wasn’t really a Pop artist, and though a big Warhol fan, instinctively ...”

“... in Holland, was prey to all sorts of debilitating symptoms: ‘Oh dear! I am very ill.’ A friend advises keeping a journal and ‘debauching a Dutch girl’. The journal meant as a solution then becomes Boswell’s problem; he is compelled to try to record everything he thinks, does and plans, but he is always behind with the record, which makes him ...”