“... 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 ...”

“... Doyle, who had never thought of Holmes as more than a sideline to his historical novels (like The White Company, now relegated to the children’s section of Amazon.com), pushed Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls. Twenty thousand people cancelled their subscriptions to the Strand. Its publisher, a marketing genius best known for a Railway Insurance Scheme ...”

“... of lame ducks. Sandy, his schizophrenic nephew; Patsy Healey, who had acted in his short film The White Bus and been depressed ever since. There was his mother and, for a while, his brother’s wife, and he was always on call to counsel and very often to subsidise needy friends and actors who had lost their way. I have had some credit because I gave room in ...”

“... to the present. The origins of the Russian dacha were aristocratic: in the early 18th century, Peter the Great gave his noble servitors plots of land on the road between St Petersburg and his new palace at Peterhof and required them to build (at their own expense) suitably impressive and well-landscaped country houses (hence the term dacha, meaning ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fashionable to do so, she looked bendable, bone and muscle fluid like a cat’s. A swathe of flax-white hair protruded from a twist of felt, and underneath was something not quite true. Exquisite bone hid under delicate faintly painted flesh, each tone subtly emphasising and leading up to the wide eyes, lighter than Scandinavian blue and deeper than Saxon ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... both grandfathers and his father were successful, well-regarded doctors. The physician’s white coat, as Stern writes, ‘was the one uniform of dignity to which Jews could aspire and in which they could feel a measure of authority and grateful acceptance’. Although medicine was in the 19th century, as it is today, far from a pure science, it held ...”

“... that I saw him in grainy photos posted by ex-pupils on Friends Reunited. Was he not the boy in the white shirt at the edge of a photograph taken in front of the school in 1980, with kids tumbling over each other and somebody spraying from a shook-up can?He tended to do well in class but on a report card for July 1978 you can see things were changing. His ...”

“... In these supposed terrae nullius, the original inhabitants had as much reason to fear the white man’s theodolite and chain as his guns and muskets. The banker followed on the heels of the surveyor, for a secure title is the best security for a loan and the farmer needed cash for seeds and tools and livestock. The bank loan and the land registry ...”