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“... as badly when I lie down, as at a desk,’ she announced soon after she began corresponding with Mary Russell Mitford, and more than once she urged the older writer to lessen the strain of fatigue or illness by adopting the practice. Though Barrett was imprisoned by a peculiarly Victorian combination of female invalidism and paternal rigidity rather than by ...”

“... Book of Horace Paraphrased’. One might list more obviously poetic lines of Pope like ‘Die of a Rose in aromatic Pain’, but better are lines that merely, yet perfectly enact the unremittingly alert language we call poetry: the exact comedy of bowls ‘obliquely waddling to the mark in view’; the just comparison of learned commentary to the silkworm and ...”

“... and showy up-dos must have seemed exotic in the New Yorker’s ascetic halls. She sported a rose in her left lapel, and carried a black and white skunk bag she was ‘inhumanly fond of’. No woman, she said, should wear a bra that cost less than $50 at Saks. Maeve Brennan photographed by Karl Bissinger in 1948 There are plenty of photographs of ...”

“... interested solely in the historical dramas, and supreme among them was the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in the great hall of Fotheringay Castle. The momentous event, the inevitability of which was conveyed in a way that no history book could rival, unfolded in distinct tableaux, in the third and last of which ...”

“... It was an ecstatic evening, from the royal arrival just after nine until ‘at 1.45 the king rose and I showed him to his car … it was the very peak, the summit, I suppose of social superiority, the King of England and the Kents etc to dine, to dine with me.’ (Channon was puzzled when the king said ‘I want to pump shit,’ presumably a mishearing ...”

“... when one steps back. Oddly favourite is a portrait of the (unappealing) Pope Paul III in a faded rose-coloured cape enthroned on a worn velvet chair, the supreme pontiff just a lay figure there to demonstrate the painter’s skill with his materials. Next to him the irresistible portrait of the 12-year-old Ranuccio Farnese and another of Clarissa Strozzi ...”

“... illegitimate children before his marriage. The year Oscar was born his father began an affair with Mary Travers, the daughter of a colleague. She was also his patient. When Sir William tried to end the relationship, Travers claimed that it had begun while she was under anaesthetic. She wrote angry letters to the Wildes and published a pamphlet about a girl ...”