“... may be a symptom. I was at times reminded of Coleridge writing in the Watchman of ‘the fine lady’ who ‘sips a beverage sweetened with human blood, even while she is weeping over the refined sorrows of Werther or Clementina’ (25 March 1796). Coleridge’s connection between breakfast sugar and the blood of the slaves who cut the cane is very much ...”

“... merchant wank, gone the hard-earned joys of the ski-slope and the hunting-field, gone Ludgrove and Lady Eden’s and the St Andrew’s Day Wall Game (‘No goals have been scored since the First World War, but Henry is always hoping’), gone the Bullingdon point-to-point, gone Glyndebourne, gone the Norland Nannies, gone the teeny silver thimbles, gone the ...”

“... was shamelessly cribbed from the manuscript of a story submitted to him for his opinion by a lady admirer. The design had to be given; the texture then came from the experiences of rather more than half a lifetime. One has always to bear in mind that, as a novelist, Stendhal was a very late starter: if his contemporary Jane Austen had waited as long as ...”

“... was to leave her in some degree of lurch. Then there is Mrs Forester, the fallen woman, or lady, whose little boy (clearly doomed from the start, like young Hanno in Buddenbrooks) was to die of rabies – there is already a rabid animal on the prowl – leaving her free to elope with the grimly tenacious Captain Hagan. The last words of The Hill ...”

“... and in Swiss Cottage, is seen for a moment in a convincing, hypothetical role – that of a bag-lady. Sometimes Dan Jacobson’s attempts to shape his raw material are less successful than this quiet masterpiece. The opening essay, ‘Kimberley’, sketches the town brilliantly – its dust, its racial divisions, ‘the stinging shriek of cicadas’ – but ...”

“... is important in Wilde; and it is the unobtrusive source of some good jokes in Pinero – as when Lady Twomley, in The Cabinet Minister, tells her daughter, ‘Imogen, there is nothing for you but this marriage or contemptible, cleanly poverty,’ or when the apopleptic colonel in The Magistrate exclaims to the policeman who is rough-handling him: ‘Do you ...”

“... distressing reading in some ways, but with a few cheery dispatches for all of us, as when one lady emerges to register: ‘It never made anybody shy away. I have had many lovers since then, and I mean lots! It’s made no difference. If anything it has caused men to love me more and with more tenderness.’ So let us end by sending a healthy hate message ...”

“... American Nancy Astor, née Langhorne, the first woman to sit in Parliament. Miss Cowles writes off Lady Astor as a silly, loquacious busybody – brave, ‘but it was sad to think she never really knew what to direct her courage against.’ She was more than that, and the Cliveden set deserves more than three pages even – or especially – if it did not ...”

“... world, is transformed in ‘Ash Wednesday’ into a purely visionary figure – a surrogate of Our Lady, an echo of Beatrice, the personal and human feeling all specialised into a channel for divine grace. Mr Moody notes, as few have done, that the first edition of ‘Ash Wednesday’ was dedicated ‘To My Wife’. There followed a period of commissioned and ...”

“... at the scene of his adventures was sifted through other writers, chief among them being an Eastern lady called Luise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, known for obvious reasons as Dame Shirley, whose letters from the California mines are a minor masterpiece of social observation, and from whom – irony of ironies – even Mark Twain seems to have picked up a trick ...”

“... some gentle reflexions on your lordship’s want either of generosity or of bowels toward a lady who had not refused you the full enjoyment of all her charms.’ That is the seamy side of the philosophy of living only in the present, so beautifully expressed in ‘Love and Life’: Then talk not of inconstancy,   False hearts, and broken vows; If ...”

“... Latin and remembered the awful embarrassment which I felt in the presence of this ancient maiden lady when we tried to do Catullus together, rumpled sheets and all. I looked out of the window onto the familiar view of Central Park in the empty classroom where I had spent senior year and heard the voices again. Then I left. In the subway downtown I thought ...”

“... be out of it.’ For this is the sixth floor.   Then I thought of Max’s story of the old lady who went to church with her ear trumpet. And so the stern Scotch sexton or verger or something, eyed her a bit. Then he said ‘Madam one toot and you’re oot.’ Perhaps that’s what it would be like, One toot and you’re oot. So she is half-like her ...”

“... Blanche was made less exotic and compared, not to a lizard, but to a more conventional peacock. Lady Marchmain first read aloud from The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which was exchanged for The Wisdom of Father Brown at the same time that the quotation from the latter about ‘a twitch on the thread’ was inserted. These are scraps. There are more ...”

“... has to fight for the phallic reality ... So I wrote my novel, which I want to call John Thomas and Lady Jane ... It rather looks as if Witter Bynner was a good influence on Lawrence, as well as being a severe and witty critic. But then, to judge by these letters, he was a pretty good fellow all round. He seems to have fancied himself as a sort of bohemian ...”