“... dramas’. Dr Crippen, a bespectacled, respectable man, who lived in North London, killed the lady, cut her up and buried her in the coal bunker. He then took up with his lover, a young thing called Ethel le Neve. Like many murders before and since, the one carried out by Dr Crippen came to be seen as a reflection on and of its time. All manner of local ...”

“... 703. I like the number – I am superstitious about them – for the zero in the middle is like a lady flanked by two gentlemen, one older and one younger.’ Dickens, and more acutely Gogol, may have influenced Roth, but probably the strongest impression was made by Viennese journalism, in particular the practice and perfection of the feuilleton, or short ...”

“... to some people about Proust, Cavafy, Caravaggio and Mozart; to others, about the Platters, The Lady Vanishes, St Elsewhere and Frazier. Taste can be criticised as surely as character can, but not every difference in character manifests a defect. Universal agreement on beauty would bring with it the desolation of uniformity, not the triumph of truth. Beauty ...”

“... numerous Harlem parties: ‘What a crowd! All classes and colours met face to face ... And yes, Lady Nancy Cunard was there all in black (she would) with 12 of her grand bracelets.’ Cunard made a collection of black writing, including some of the major names of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston among them, and published it under the title ...”

“... consumption, the arranged marriages, sense of family dynasties, assumption of the role of Lady Bountiful, adoption of royalist policies and of particular kinds of religious observance. Hence, too, an obsession with etiquette that was all the more punctilious because they were not very sure of themselves. No doubt there was much more to it than ...”

“... and we might have been. But it may all have been romance; in private life Beatrice Lillie was Lady Peel and my aunties even adduced her as a distant connection. The mill gone, my grandparents bought a hardware shop in West Vale outside Halifax but that too went bankrupt, through sheer kind-heartedness my mother said, and letting too much stuff out on ...”

“... inflation. Templer and Duport, Mona and Quiggin, Mrs Erdleigh and Mr Deacon, General Conyers and Lady Molly, not to speak of Widmerpool or Stringham, speak in expressive voices that, even at the more exotic end of the spectrum, never strain belief; in more vernacular idiom, the exchanges between Albert, Billson and Bracey at Stonehurst have little in common ...”

“... advantageous to his kingship. It also entailed acts unconventional in a saint. A high-born lady near Paris committed adultery and had her lover kill her husband: she was sentenced to death. Queen Margaret and other noble ladies, backed by mendicant friars, pleaded with Louis for her life. He stood firm, and the woman was burned alive. (Chivalry shunned ...”

“... showed its absurdities. In seven of his pictures a pug is shown as the accessory of a fashionable lady. A dog bred to have an appearance that limits its ability to breathe, itʼs an apt mascot for the social sphere Tissot depicted in his ...”

“... all reference I am taxed with “injustice”. If I make a pointed reference, as I did in “Our Lady of the Snows”, I am ... supposed to be scaring away immigrants by misrepresenting the climate of the Dominion.’ In 1889, when he was crossing the United States and reporting on his travels to his Indian papers, he took some liberties with his ...”

“... not to distress ladies. ‘Goodwife’ smyth, however, was perhaps not under class-protection as lady, damsel or gentlewoman. In which case one can credit Sir Thomas, man and author, with consistent chivalry, at the same time noting that this ‘chivalry’ applied only to the upper ranks of society, protecting them from casual outrage – but also exposing ...”

“... happier than when after high tea (he loathed High Table) he could read to or with a sympathetic lady or two, make jokes, be mildly flirtatious. Rhoda Broughton, the spinster novelist who lived with her sister in Holywell, was a vivacious and reliable guest until they quarrelled, not because she had put him into Belinda – he rather liked that, and ...”

“... Thirties the morbid Joynson-Hicks was for ever having books seized by the Police – Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were but two of the kind of thing he was after. David Low portrayed him as a funeral mute with thick crêpe on his hat. Even that little classic The Specialist was a cause of some anxiety at Putnam, and a sigh of relief went up when the ...”

“... bank. Nonetheless he is under Shakespeare’s spell. He falls for his sister’s lover, a Dark Lady called Petra, and is unwittingly trapped in a Shakespearean plot, a sort of Thirteenth Night, in which, pinned down by a beagle, he is seduced by Petra and so effectively conceives his sister’s child, while the sister apparently dies but doesn’t ...”

“... isn’t. Al’s world is populated by beings who are immaterial, yet exist: such as the little old lady dressed in pink who appears in the attic, searching for her lost son and daughter, and vanishes again soon afterwards in terror, muttering distractedly about ‘an evil thing’ that has happened in the house. From the age of eight or nine Al has seen ...”