“... Felix found himself delivering a love-note from a student of his father’s to a sublimely naked lady who had probably served as the model for one of Holbein’s Madonnas; he himself, Ladurie notes, had a handsome nose of the Holbein persuasion, the sort that can become ‘the decisive argument’ of the painted face. Nor was it just the learning, the ...”

“... without occasionally feeling that Mrs Castle, and the nation, have been unlucky. There was another lady Cabinet Minister who was a wholly political animal, who worked like a Trojan, who fought her departmental corner like a tigress, and who was not above using carefully-calculated feminine histrionics to bounce an embarrassed Cabinet into conceding her more ...”

“... come to visit only the master of the house. This enables Sir John to forget to locate his wife. Is Lady Clerk allowed to occupy the central block with her husband? He will be rather lonely when guests are absent if she does not. Or is she squeezed into a side pavilion with maidservants and children? Above all, though, stands the upper-class belief that the ...”

“... was told to amend the piece; I was sent off with the reset galleys to find Sir Thomas. He and Lady Beecham were at a theatre, sitting in the stalls, with the curtain about to go up. Kneeling, I handed Sir Thomas the revised version and, as the lights went down, he read it. He did not speak, but he condescended to nod. Two emotions then assailed me. I was ...”

“... Hamilton (carried over from Emerson’s first novel, Second Sight), is a bright, young and pretty lady of letters. In the enjoyment of what is apparently the most enviable of modern lives, she is unexpectedly deserted by Martin, her Classics-don-at-London-University husband. A ‘black sea of despair’ engulfs Jennifer. She lies awake until three o’clock ...”

“... Themes of anti-braininess and anti-feminism run through this book, and every period it covers. Lady Oxford says firmly that, before the war, ‘you had to be clever to go into law, diplomacy, the Civil Service, or politics, and few of the aristocracy ever became stockbrokers. All this has changed, and big business has attracted many young men of birth and ...”

“... Nose. A bizarre coda was added when friends followed a ‘double’ to the apartment of a certain lady, but Solzhenitsyn was not amused: they had uncovered his secret liaison with Svetlova, the woman who became his second wife. Marriage to Svetlova seemed inevitable when she became pregnant. Radiation, had not, after all, destroyed the fertility of this ...”

“... saw the poor little broken Baroness away for good and so pathetic ... we were very glad we went. Lady Delamere was crying afterwards. Long before her ‘frightful trial’ with words began, Karen Blixen had endured so much pain, indignity and disappointment that by the age of 46, she had become impervious to the dictates of fate. The claim that ‘no one ...”

“... and precise political statement in a recipe, or to find the culinary counterparts to Guernica or Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, capable of earning their creators obloquy, exile or death. Marinetti’s fascist-surrealist manifesto, La Cucina Futurista, with its diatribe against unmanly pasta asciutta, was at once a singular exception and a total failure: pasta only ...”

“... 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 ...”