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“... 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 ...”

“... Romeo and Juliet, The Widow of an Indian Chief watching over the arms of her deceased husband, The Lady in Milton’s Comus and other pictures essentially literary in their inspiration. Here the provincial label really does fail to stick: but the pictures also have little of the strangeness which makes so many of the others memorable. In his landscape ...”

“... with the personals in their proper place and the life of a community instead of a benighted lady at stake?’ What a wealth of opprobrium that miserable appellation ‘personals’ has for Grierson. This collection of essays argues persuasively that the public and the popular British cinema, from Gainsborough melodrama to Hammer horror, had more regard ...”

“... unknowable world in which Henry James is careful to keep Millie Theale, his fabulously rich young lady in The Wings of the Dove. The rich, as Fitzgerald knew, are different from us, and hence ideal inhabitants of the gossip world. The ideal gossiper is an outsider with no hope of penetrating the secrets that absorb him. Dr Spacks says that she and her friend ...”

“... has traditionally held out much appeal to the British comic muse. Daphne, ‘a 68-year-old ex-lady novelist’, conceives an irresistible crush for Liam, her alcoholic, agonisingly cuckolded landlord, a man some thirty years younger than she. While he is paralytic, Daphne straps him to the bed, with intent to ravish. Wisely, however, she has consulted her ...”

“... fantasy – the gruff dads, with their tools and their guileless dungarees. At the end of Lady Chatterly’s Lover Mellors tells Connie that everything would be all right if men sang and danced every evening, dressed in tight red trousers. Bly, who likes his Lawrence, can think of nothing to do about the modern landscape except turn away from it. Iron ...”

“... the pauper and ‘little Margaret Rose’ was as often invoked around our council estate as ‘Our Lady’ in Naples. Scarcely a girl had not kept a cuttings-book of her magazine pictures. Early earmarked as naughty Madcap Meg of the royal soap, she infiltrated the proletarian unconscious so deeply that I had sexy dreams about her even after I had escaped to ...”

“... shade, demoted to the background of the picture, their way barred by the crowded diggings. A young lady distributes tracts. A crazed herb-seller moves anxiously forward. Carlyle himself is there, on the sidelines, looking curiously furtive. Central to the picture is its heroine, her poised gesture reflecting that of the valiant workman who stands behind ...”

“... longer satisfy. Even when solicitude was entirely free of any suspicion of legacy-hunting, as with Lady Astor, it was still no good; nothing could make up for that mother. Finally he wanted to be rid of himself. In his seventies he continued abnormally vigorous, writing a lot,* rewriting a lot (including several biographies of himself), and lecturing furiously ...”

“... exploded: ‘I have waited five weeks for a decision and I can’t wait any longer. I shall tell Lady Allenby to come home.’ Lloyd George took him by the arm and said, ‘You have waited five weeks, Lord Allenby, wait five minutes more.’ Fuming, Allenby waited – and got what he wanted. Allenby’s emancipatory decree, like others elsewhere, turned out ...”

“... Daughter-in-Law’ for the stage, and after it – in 1953 – to do a screen version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The Board of Censors sat on that one: sexual intercourse, in the Larkinian sense, had not yet quite arrived. Sex played a not unambiguous part in Hughes’s own life, which was no doubt in keeping with his English persona. His siblings ...”