“... 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 ...”

“... Opus 7, a satirical narrative in the style of Crabbe, based on the story of a ‘drinking old lady ... a neighbour for many years, and I had the greatest esteem for her because she knew what she wanted,’ came out in 1931. The late poems were privately printed, except for Boxwood, which STW thought of simply as verses for Reynolds Stone’s wood ...”

“... these events on the life of the house is the subject of the tale. The top flat belongs to an old lady, long retired from her job and on her last lap. She is not a sibyl or a sage, but she is the presiding intelligence, the Mrs Moore of the story. The middle flat is inhabited by a family – father in advertising, mother in a social work job and in love with ...”

“... in their lives that makes ours ugly. In one of the stories in Pig Earth, a little old peasant lady goes out and gathers wild things in the mountains – wild cherries, lilies of the valley, mushrooms, mistletoe – and takes her booty into the city, where she sells it in the market for vast sums. She is selling not only delicious wild produce but glimpses ...”

“... moderated since the Sixties and Seventies, when characters with names like Samantha Light-body and Lady Driver frequented his work. But George Orwell for one would not have held this against him, and the truth is that Frayn is among the funniest novelists alive today. ‘Life, I have come to see, is nothing more nor less than another way of writing ...”

“... courts and rooms: only beneath the awe-inspiring gateway of Thornton Abbey does a sheepish lady in a red hat smile at the photographer. This landscape is unreal even for today. Where are the motorcars, the lawn-mowers, the ice-cream vans, the Saturday afternoon bikers, the bored children, the ignorant tourists, and our inattentive selves? Urban Britain ...”

“... is a good paper, David Astor ‘has flair. It’s not all done by luck’; ancient scandal – a lady-in-waiting of Queen Victoria thought to have been pregnant and a virgin; and best of all, Church politics: ‘Do you go to church?’ he asked. ‘Oh, Church of England. I see the Church of England is making overtures to the Church of Scotland. The Church ...”