“... a long moustache and a Van Dyke beard, smoking an opium pipe. Above my left breast I got a naked lady, a rear view of her squatting, but that one faded. And then on my back I got a chick doing the limbo, going under the bar, with little black panties on. That one came out nice. Just before I got released, I was going to get a vampire. A guy had done a ...”

“... rings my agent Rosalind Chatto to tell her that when in last year’s LRB diary I quote an old lady in New York as saying ‘I zigged when I should have zagged’ the original remark came from the American sports reporter Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old ...”

“... the kilt matches the Havana wrapper perfectly. Here are some samples. Ladies first. ‘Advice to a Lady’ is a poem in which Padilla, like a Cuban Sexus Propertius, or rather a political Ovid, gives her cue to a lady from the Cuban haute bourgeoisie, reluctant to vanish, on how to behave improperly, according to the new ...”

“... the most significant of his day, such as Eliot and Lawrence. In 1962 he dined with Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley in Paris, ‘and was much taken with them’, on his way to spending three weeks in the USSR – where his novels sold in hundreds of thousands – as the guest of the Writer’s Union. ‘This is the happiest day of my life,’ he said at the ...”

“... and seductive war widows fail to wean Louis from his obsession with Madame Laura, the local ‘hot lady’ whose stolen panties he won from a friend as a result of a bet over the timing of the German invasion. There are other things here which might suggest the earthier and homelier version of L’Education Sentimentale, though in The Sorrow of Belgium Louis ...”

“... rules of seduction, he says, with ‘two exceptions. I never deflower and I do not persist if the lady doesn’t want me.’ Regarding one of these statements the present writer’s recollection is slightly different. And then, of course, there is the wine. The reader can learn a good deal about its production and the internecine politics of the growers. But ...”

“... For the Wodehouse archive he is assembling, Edward Cazalet, grandson of the 99-year-old widowed Lady Wodehouse, recently bought, for £175, a short ts. letter from Wodehouse to a Mr Slater, dated 2 July 1953. Mr Slater had asked Wodehouse where Market Blandings was, the station for the Castle, with Jno Robinson’s taxi waiting to rattle you up to the home ...”

“... want. In the series of letters exchanged between Benjamin Disraeli and Frances Anne Vane-Tempest, Lady Londonderry (known as ‘Vane’) there’s an unexplained hiatus. A silence, beginning in 1839, the year of Disraeli’s marriage, and persisting until 1845, overtook the correspondence. Now the gap, on Disraeli’s side at least, is factitiously ...”

“... the Dead Sea, offered genuine relief to the semi-disabled. Thanks to the Maple furniture heiress, Lady Weigall, Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire achieved social distinction in the Belle Epoque; the patroness always took the last two coaches of the Boston-London train for herself and her servants. The mansion she built for herself became the officers’ mess for ...”

“... round to see (Steadying her red-sepal hat with the russet-silk flutes) Creamy-armed Hera with Lady Athene (Holding their scallop-edged parasol high) As they wobble their way down the dunes Apollonius of Rhodes, in his Medea-Jason epic, transformed Homer’s goddesses into images of aristocratic ladies of the Ptolemaic court in Alexandria, providing a ...”

“... of a married woman until the mid-19th century. Before that point, it meant something like ‘boss lady’, a female honorific, indicating authority. Some words that now feel firmly gendered originally had another meaning. ‘Vagina’ meant the scabbard of a sword. I could not hate this more. The idea that it is a protective casing for a phallic weapon feels ...”

“... said Terry. ‘That’s because she’s never been away,’ said Ballantyne. ‘All over, dear lady. You can get up now.’ And he helped Mrs Donaldson back onto her chair. ‘Ballantyne obviously fancies you,’ said Delia when they were talking in the canteen afterwards. And when Mrs Donaldson pulled a face, ‘You could do a lot worse.’ There had been ...”

“... edge of the wood, the dermatologist said, ‘extracting nourishment from the legs of unsuspecting lady passengers. Men were never affected, their stouter nether garments providing sufficient protection. The tram was disinfected, the grooves were planed out … the epidemic came to an end.’ In 2008, bugs were found on the New York subway, on wooden benches ...”

“... a pendant to one of the greatest of European portraits. (Unfortunately the painting, bequeathed by Lady Eastlake to the National Gallery, was destroyed in the flood of 1928 at the Tate Gallery, to which it had been transferred.) It illustrates the taste – not just for Raphael but for Guido Reni – against which the Pre-Raphaelites rebelled, but it also ...”

“... his back touching it, was served by white-gloved footmen, and for the first and last time took a lady to dinner in a grand procession (he did not know which arm to take, and still doesn’t). Lord Hastings was strict but fair; he discouraged fooling about at cricket; he stopped tutor and son playing football among his Chinese urns; and he tolerated only ...”