“... baby, she had grabbed without thinking a sexy red bra, now clearly visible under her businesslike white blouse. Trapped between the Muffia and the sexists at the office, Kate splurges on shoes, flirts dangerously with a client, and works, works, works – until finally her husband leaves and she has to, as they say, rethink her priorities. The fantasy element ...”

“... This summer​ , a new monument appeared in Budapest’s Liberty Square. Amid a copse of truncated white marble pillars stands the metal figure of a slender young man. Wrapped from hips to feet in windswept drapery, he opens his arms to the sky. In his right hand he bears the orb of political authority surmounted by the Hungarian double-barred cross ...”

“... to be rich: ‘I already owned five fur coats,’ she wrote in her memoir, ‘so I ordered a white mink, floor length, and wore it with pleasure, even if it did make me look like I was rolling along on casters.’ Despite which, as she discovered, she was being paid less than her male colleagues. Muriel meanwhile battled on against headaches, depression ...”

“... upheavals – were linked, and should be treated in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved ...”

“... knee breeks black silk stockings high heeled shoes with large buckles, blue coat, yellow vest white neck cloth with stiffner and frilled shirt – he is one of the Queen Ann folks’. The pretty brick so-called Queen Anne style of the 1870s which Thomson thus mocked was the architecture of a perplexed generation. Invented largely by ex-assistants of Sir ...”

“... that follows deal in Odysseus, the Minotaur, and Zeus creating the world from an egg (‘the white flew up to become the sky, the yolk descended into earth’). Also Princess Si Ling-chi, who, legend records, discovered silk when a cocoon fell into her teacup as she was sitting under a mulberry tree. She instructed her maid to take the loose end, which ...”

“... watching his daughter Flavia beneath a ‘dark and contingent cedar tree … sitting on a white wooden seat, in her unutterable otherness, her pet marmoset on her shoulder, her cap of auburn hair shining like burnished gold on her head. Nearer to the house, in the rose-garden, their younger daughter, seven-year-old Perdita, strange, mysterious and ...”

“... to be the focal point from Telford’s refuge, are invisible, except for the odd glimpse of white water; in summer nothing whatever can be seen. A plaque, unveiled in 1996 by the parliamentary under-secretary of state for Wales, and commemorating George Borrow’s enjoyment of what he described as ‘one of the wildest and most beautiful scenes ...”

“... as revealing as they seem. He may have been inspired by the multiple narrators of The Woman in White: like witnesses presenting their evidence the characters contradict and expose themselves. Agatha Christie’s famously unfair mystery, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is written as a diary, proving just how unreliable ‘honest’ narrators can be. Sayers ...”

“... They were animated not so much by Voltaire’s regard for the modernising zeal of the heirs of Peter I, but by the belief that it was Russia’s very ‘barbarism’, its proximity to the despotic rule and military virtue of the nomadic Scythians described by Herodotus, that made it the perfect agent for the regeneration of Europe. In a continent already ...”

“... to get away with his career in the Colonial Service, one of open opposition to the enrichment of white colonists by an exploitation of black subjects. Rumbled finally and called home, he retired to a small, exquisite Elizabethan house in Oxfordshire to write a blazing exposé of the relations between white capital and ...”

“... below her house (‘a skeletal figure with two pendulous bosoms dangling from her ribcage like white leather wineskins two-thirds empty; her pruny arms and legs the colour of butterscotch in the bright light’), are infused at once with moral disgust and an almost erotic disappointment. She is transfixed by Hellman’s huge pillowy breasts (‘like ...”

“... let’s have us honey –‘It set the prosodic pattern,’ Berryman told the interviewer, Peter Stitt, who had been a student of his a few years earlier. The interview was conducted in a ward in St Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis, where Berryman seemed to be comfortable. He spent quite a bit of time there during the last few years of his life. In ...”

“... major blight, a steady stream of ‘I-Spy’ water fowl. Fish corpses (nothing more exciting than white-bellied carp). I think we can assume that we have penetrated the Lea Valley’s recreational zone. Boats. Wet suits. Easy access to the North Circular Road, the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick ...”

“... do for the bedazzling, now-dead she-eminence. The most beautiful photo I downloaded was one that Peter Hujar took of her in the 1970s, around the time of I, Et Cetera. She’s wearing a thin grey turtleneck and lies on her back – arms up, head resting on her clasped hands and her gaze fixed impassively on something to the right of the frame. There’s a ...”