“... unusually explicit about the fissure that runs through his work: ‘No one is going to catch me, lady, and make me a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun. (So perhaps he thinks, but it is only his greatest pretend.)’ One reason for his reluctance to identify with adults was that he could hardly look them in the eye. He never grew much ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”