“... 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 ...”

“... giving a compelling account of the Burgundian and French contexts in which Anne was raised to be a lady of the court. Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, described Anne at the age of thirteen as ‘so bright and pleasant for her young age’. Margaret’s court was full of art and literature: she owned tapestries, sculptures, paintings (including ...”

“... they brought the Danelaw to heel. After Æthelred died in 911, his widow, Æthelflæd, ruled as ‘Lady of the Mercians’ until her death in 918, by which point the Vikings had either surrendered or been forced back north of the Humber. Edward then took over Mercia, establishing his own direct rule there, a transition made easier by the lack of a male heir to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... treated more carefully by George. Myrtle is sent to a posh boarding school to be ‘made into a lady’. Pompey Jones becomes a regular visitor to the Hardy household, on the pretext of doing odd jobs for George, but is sent away when one of his mysterious re-arrangements of the household furnishings causes George’s pregnant wife, Annie, to fall ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... boy from Ireland suddenly surrounded by lots of posh people’. It makes you wonder why Lord and Lady Wilde paid those school fees. Merlin Holland’s essay on his grandfather in Peter Raby’s Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde illuminates these appropriations by charting a series of significant errors through multiple versions of Wilde’s history. Holland ...”

“... than Dublin. In Dublin he had soon become involved not only in singing circles – the Italian lady who taught him believed she had ‘found a successor to Campanini’, the celebrated Italian tenor – but also in the business of politics and electioneering. He had natural skills for both. For the rest of his life he would tell stories of the great ...”

“... the mid-Seventies and staggered into the clear blue water of the Thatcher decade. Until the Iron Lady appeared on the scene. Hanson and White had been equivocal about politics. Tories they both were of course, but pragmatic Tories, careful not to offend the Labour Governments of the Sixties and Seventies. Hanson nurtured his relationship with his fellow ...”

“... wear a nightie, ducked her in the surf, threw away her wedding ring and worshipped her as ‘Our Lady of the Sands’. Linda herself claims to be descended from Joan of Arc, so – pace Bryan – you don’t really care when she sees UN number plates on Richard and Dan’s car, or CIA notepaper in their beach house. Nor do you think that Dan’s sojourn in a ...”

“... on children’s clothes and shoes, they would never, never, never get it through the House.’ The lady doth protest too much. Three nevers in a row! On food, she said: ‘Let me say to people I have undertaken not to do it on food ...’ But of course she had already done so: that principle was breached when she introduced VAT on takeaways. One remembers the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with them was enjoyable, if confusing sometimes. I thought of getting together with a little old lady in Worthing to write some sharp little stories she had in mind but it never came off. I did write a poem, called ‘Two Fingers’, with Judy Delaghty, about a young woman losing her virginity in a drunken and brutal way at a party, but there’s not much of ...”

“... stopped for coffee at an estaminet which, unknown to him but not to passing Staff, a notorious lady from Paris had ‘staffed with some winsome daughters of Rahab’? This incident is one of a hundred-odd entries listed under ‘Anecdotes’ in the index, which is clearly Dunn’s own loving work. He was a man with an eye for landscape, weather and ...”