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“... chair with my mouth pressed to an impervious surface of glass.’ Another story, ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’, is about a puppet prostitute, the ‘quintessence of eroticism’, who comes alive at the kiss of her puppeteer. Still acting out her role, she sinks her teeth into his neck and kills him, after which she wonders whether she had always ‘parodied ...”

“... women who mutter ‘Thank you, signora, it’s a pleasure to serve even a rich and impious Anglo lady such as yourself, take another punnet, our brothers take precedence in our father’s will, but we’re content with that.’ Now in the context of the blues – oh yeh – a love song about an owlet or a moo-cowlet playing up don’t seem right. Under the ...”

“... at the pictures themselves; especially at the people who copied them, the sometimes charming young lady painters.’ Du Maurier offered the plot of Trilby to Henry James, who didn’t take it up but who had, in The American, already noted the same class of Louvre lady painter: Christopher Newman looked ‘not only at all the ...”

“... love. He met the ex-empress Zita 25 years ago, and loves her as only a royalist can love a royal lady. He is to her what Christian of Brunswick was to the deposed Queen of Bohemia: a champion wearing her glove in his helmet. He can also turn into a royal corgi and snap at ankles belonging to critical or disrespectful persons. He has already written a life of ...”

“... cream of local society, including the Dean and the Bishop, succumbed to insobriety, one elderly lady being discovered unconscious beneath the piano by her dog, which, alarmed by her absence, had come to investigate. The difficulty is compounded by her subject’s reluctance to reveal anything whatsoever of her inner self, whether in ...”

“... fell in and out of love with Margaret Thatcher. Although George Urban found her ‘an attractive lady’, with ‘the movements, the legs and walk of a young woman’, his love affair was wholly ideological. Urban, who is or was on the extreme right, was attracted by ‘the great spirit that animated her policies in many areas’; and he greatly admired her ...”

“... talk of erectile tissue prompts Malcolm to quote Lord Rochester, which leads to an argument with Lady Antonia about whether or not Rochester is ‘porno’ – Malcolm’s word – during which the New Zealander sticks ‘his pink face into Antonia’s pale one’, and is described as ‘beaky’, ‘in the throes of ...”

“... first sees Marian Halcombe: I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat … I ...”

“... We travellers are in very hard circumstances,’ said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. ‘If we tell anything new we are laughed at as fabulous.’ This mistrust of the footloose is endorsed by the trenchant definition of ‘traveller’s tale’ in Chambers’ Dictionary: ‘an astounding lie about what one professes to have seen abroad ...”

“... to smaller jointure in exchange for a promise to delay the payment of her portion. As a certain Lady Modish laments in Ann Murry’s ‘The Tête à Tête’ of 1779, another poem reprinted by Lonsdale: ‘How cruel is my fate! how great the fall! / So large my fortune, yet my jointure small.’ From 1675 until around 1778, Staves contends, the equity ...”

“... the lead pieces in the ‘Talk of the Town’ section and ran as letters from the ‘Long-Winded Lady’ – a sobriquet arising from the fact that they were about nothing in particular and perhaps intended to make them seem less dark and melancholy than they usually were. When the pieces were collected in The Long-Winded ...”

“... him ‘as a dramatic and pretty subject’. Young Lord Stafford, it seemed, was in love with Lady Grosvenor, whom he had known before her marriage, but had now no expectation of being able to marry as her husband was alive and robust. ‘Yielding to family pressure,’ as James put it, ‘he offered his hand to a young, charming, innocent girl, the ...”

“... Helps’ and so on. They invent inspired and malicious nicknames: the political hostess Lady Holland is ‘the stern old Witch of the (Kensington) Alps’, in Carlyle’s memorable phrase – reduced to ‘the Witch’ in his accounts of her social gatherings. Jane uses a Scottish phrase for the dandified Henry Fleming: he is ‘Jenkin’s ...”

“... to compete with the poet or dramatist, and best of all with epic and tragedy. The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Delaroche reminds us that the ‘great business’ was not neglected in the 19th century, although by then there were those who argued that painting what could be seen, whether landscape or ‘modern life’, should be a higher priority. It was ...”

“... be without people, without their cousins. The house was full of people, their uncle and aunt and a lady nicknamed Mignonette, who was Mother’s friend, and visitors who came for a few hours. They saw them on the balcony having drinks after tennis, their socks red from the dust of the court, or, if they stayed up late, they might see them again dressed for ...”