“... of Vienna in 1815. Britain’s Lord Castlereagh, the future suicide, was remembered at home by Lady Morgan for ‘his cloudless smile ... his untunable voice and passion for singing all the songs in The Beggar’s Opera’. In Vienna he behaved like the Ulster Protestant he was, staying in with his wife and household on a Sunday to sing hymns to a ...”

“... just a photographer. He designed, too. Oklahoma, things like that.’ ‘I think it was My Fair Lady, maam.’ ‘Oh, was it?’ said the Queen, unused to being contradicted. ‘Where did you say you worked?’ She put the book back in the boy’s big red hands. ‘In the kitchens, maam.’ She had still not solved her problem, knowing that if she left ...”

“... enjoyed writing that. But they all came from different rungs of the social ladder. At the top was Lady Gregory, who had a big house and plenty of tenants; and then Synge, who had a small private income, as Beckett and Wilde did, and a memory of glory; and then Yeats, who worked all his life, not only for his living, but at making himself grander than he ...”

“... down and identifying a supporting cast of thousands. Did Shaw covertly admire a young Scandinavian lady at a tea-party given by one of his advanced admirers, Bertha Newcombe? Weintraub can tell us that Nellie Erichsen lived at 6 Trafalgar Studios, Manresa Road, Chelsea, illustrated several volumes of the ‘Highways and Byways’ series and translated a number ...”

“... ambiguity, the ambiguity of poetic language itself. Thus the Holocaust imagery in poems like ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’, which Rose analyses in brilliant detail, has to be seen both in the contexts of Plath’s longtime political concerns and in relation to the traces in language and writing of her unconscious fantasies and her personal ...”

“... when remembering those times, often describing them as the best in their lives. Even the one old lady who hadn’t a good word to say about Wright coloured and became unwontedly animated at the memories of battles ...”

“... Rainbow, and End as a Man, Young Torless, Cavafy and others bizarrer, Lord Weary, Das Schloss, Lady Windermere’s Fan ... The nymphomaniac pensioners in ‘The Sexy Old Ladies of Havergo Hall’ are less discriminating in their pursuit of pleasure: If it breathes, and wears trousers, they move in ...”

“... and David married Tap’s dim daughter, Sydney. David and Sydney did not know how to be Lord and Lady Redesdale: perhaps, as Highland Fling suggests, no one quite knew what lords and ladies were for after 1918. The dim Redesdales produced the six Mitford girls, so bright and silly, as well as an overshadowed son (killed in action). The parents will be ...”

“... she lorded it over the locals, and occasionally performed. One impresario remembers a ‘grand old lady’ singing ‘Vissi d’arte’ in a cabaret there. Writes Enrico Jr: ‘He praised her singing and asked: “You have been an opera singer, no?” She told him with pride: “Yes. I am Giachetti.” ’ A complex, performative utterance: I am Giachetti. The ...”

“... middle-aged woman attempts to impregnate herself using pilfered sperm. And in ‘The Former First Lady and the Football Hero’, perhaps her most ambitious story, Homes depicts Nancy Reagan visiting online chat rooms so that she can experience anonymity. Why has she resorted to such threadbare territory here? This is Homes’s first novel in six years, and ...”

“... Byron’s slippers from a man in Missolonghi, on behalf of Byron’s very odd great-granddaughter Lady Wentworth. Along with other excerpts from his books and pieces of journalism (including his own account of the Kreipe affair), this story is collected in Words of Mercury, which provides a good taster of what Leigh Fermor’s writing has to offer. That is ...”

“... of the Aquarium, Captain Molesworth by name, had the hoardings posted with pictures of the young lady in the ordinary attire of a gymnast and of another performer named Paula. Richard Roberts had castigated the Royal Aquarium as ‘a jumble of degrading entertainments of various kinds’. Had the writer intended the contrast between Zao’s nightly ...”

“... of episodes from many pages back. That parachuting dog lands in the back garden of an aristocratic lady, where the remaining nuns from María’s order are living secretly in outhouses. It is the ‘Miracle of the Puppy in the Garden’, proof to the nuns that God smiles on their clandestine convent. Such connections are desultory and without special ...”

“... was anecdotal – indeed largely built on the evidence of one anecdote, of the little old lady who ‘finds excreta pushed through her letterbox’ and is pursued by ‘charming wide-grinning piccaninnies’ chanting ‘Racist’ – and the imagery apocalyptic. Yet the whole was served up within a carapace of systematic reasoning. Politically, the ...”

“... subject. Yet it is now given out that Andy was judgmental all along, nipping off secretly to Our Lady of the Perpetual Whatever to abase himself weekly, and helping out with soup-runs and such whenever he wasn’t over-committed elsewhere. At his memorial in St Patrick’s Cathedral, some of the better-heeled mourners made much of this life of occluded ...”