“... had a growing client list and was making a real name for himself as a celebrity crimper and ‘top London hairdresser’ as the papers referred to him. I used to get annoyed with him for never being home. I wanted more of his attention. Following some bad times with the crimper and the loss of her record company, Lulu has found popularity again by singing ...”

“... as, V, 327, 328; good intentions of, V, 372; in ancient Greece, I, 326, 450c; in Cadiz, V, 114; in London, V, 474, 493; in Venice, IV, 163, 541c; of Assyria, VI, 613c; of Bahylon, V, 445; of the historical Sardanapalus, VI, 624c; opera company members as, V, 230; Semiramis as, VI, 618c; wives as, V, 208    educated and ...”

“... kind: whisky priest and puritan policeman present, as it were, love and honour; Scobie, his wife Louise and his girlfriend Helen afford a ready-made tableau like Orestes and Hermione and Andromaque. The complete arbitrariness available to the Classical stage is so cunningly naturalised that we hardly notice at first reading how the parts have been taken from ...”

“... occurred.Breton visited Freud early, in Vienna in 1921, and Salvador Dalí met him late, in London in 1938, but Freud, a conservative in aesthetic matters, was sceptical from start to finish. ‘I was inclined to look upon the Surrealists,’ he wrote to Stefan Zweig, ‘as absolute (let us say 95 per cent, like alcohol) cranks.’ One ...”

“... storm. She sent her report to the Irish Met Service in Dublin, who shared it with the Allies in London. The next day, the meteorologist James Martin Stagg’s team of forecasters identified a break in the storm on 6 June, a narrow window of opportunity over the Channel that would allow the landings to begin.* German forecasters, without any access to ...”

“... and, after preliminary discussions between de Valera and Lloyd George, negotiations took place in London between 11 October and 6 December of that year. De Valera remained in Dublin, however; the negotiating team was made up of Griffith, its leader, Collins and three others. The delegates were appointed plenipotentiaries, but with instructions to consult ...”

“... his own words. Kerguelen, who had disobeyed orders by sailing into unknown seas with his mistress Louise Seguin (an erotic consolation suggested by Philibert Commerson, who had himself joined Bougainville’s round the world expedition with a young woman dressed as a man) and whose evasive treatment of his own discovery appears to be symptomatic of inner ...”

“... to the cellist and teacher Hugo Becker, with whom Hermann took lessons. It was transported to London and finally to the Museo del Violino in Cremona, where it had been made three centuries earlier.The protagonists of the final – comic – story are the ‘world’s most famous shipwrecked cello’, the ‘Mara’ Stradivarius, and its succession of ...”

“... to see another novel called Susan – the future Northanger Abbey, which in 1803 she sold to the London firm of Crosby. In April 1809, shortly before the move to Chawton, where she would have time to write, Austen sent a letter to Crosby asking him to publish Susan as he was contracted to do. She even threatened, if he did not, to place it elsewhere. Crosby ...”

“... in 1898 between the British and the French was attended by a prodigious rattling of sabres in London and Paris. The two armies in the field never came to blows, but France lost face at Fashoda and a tide of Anglophobia engulfed the Parisian press. It lasted through the Boer wars and beyond. Le Petit Journal, a scurrilous right-wing Republican daily, which ...”

“... for ‘Pretty Vacant’. Siouxsie Sioux and the teenage misfits who hung out at Club Louise, a lesbian bar in Soho, danced to Abba and Diana Ross in the basement. Elvis Costello lifted the piano frills of ‘Dancing Queen’ for ‘Oliver’s Army’. Abba seemed to hark back to the early days of rock’n’roll, capturing its bubblegum paradox ...”

“... and individual consciousness. Eavan Boland was born in Dublin in 1944, but moved as a child to London. In Object Lessons she says that this ‘ordinary displacement made an extraordinary distance between the word place and the word mine’. When interviewed a few years ago, she even traced her psycho-political preoccupations to the ‘estrangement’ which ...”

“... Dalloway. It is Peter who has held her feet most relentlessly to the fire, and now he’s back in London after three decades as a colonial administrator in India, mannerisms intact – notably the habit of opening and closing the pocket knife he always carries with him whenever he feels agitated. And there’s an even harsher challenge to Clarissa’s ...”

“... Four hospitals – Walsall Manor in the West Midlands; the North Middlesex in Enfield, North London; Hillingdon, the closest emergency hospital to Heathrow Airport; and the James Paget in Great Yarmouth – declared their beds 100 per cent full on more than half the days in that winter period. Between them, the hospitals in Worcester and neighbouring ...”

“... without ever dominating this third volume as the wonderful letters Flaubert wrote to his mistress Louise Colet dominated the second. The hectic and intrusive Colet is by this date gone from Flaubert’s life, a ‘bonne Muse’ no longer requiring to be fended off by letter but sacrificed once and for all to the autonomy of Work. She resurfaces only in her ...”