“... him an educational book which he humbly requests the old man to pass on to his daughter. It is Lady Chatterley’s Lover: but Seven does not want his girl to read all that stuff. He has written in the margins loving messages taken from the works of Shakespeare. Kole Omotoso seems to express a mood of yearning for the old innocent days of the Colony and ...”

“... biography, her heroic generosity and toughness – lie beneath these brilliant accounts of Lady Byron (arrogant and devious), Countess Tolstoy (‘devoted one minute, embattled the next’), and Pasternak’s jealous mistress Olga Ivinskaya. But they are not allowed to surface: only the dryest of comments implies the point of view: ‘Olga’s jealousy ...”

“... of the object represented. A good example of this is Onslow Ford’s haunting Snowdrift in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. A bony, pre-pubescent, nude girl (a subject quite unknown to Classical art) sleeps in a feverish attitude upon a bed of snow which floats upon a glassy block of pale-green banded onyx. The tight and silky surface of the skin ...”

“... idealist working for socialism, but a more hurtfully divided personality for whom the conceit of lady-killing may have been a needful stimulus. To inquire into these things is not to pry indecently, but to seek better understanding of human nature in politics, the terms on which man holds, fumblingly, his tenure as a political being. They relate to both his ...”

“... be a pimp, how to start up as a prostitute, how to get a free breakfast if you are a shopping-bag lady. This is truly life without enlightenment, and although unhappy childhoods are presented as extenuating circumstances for the three protagonists and their gutter existence, one feels brutalised by the fact that any kind of alternative is totally ...”

“... In a second volume, he proposes to discuss Anna Karenina, The Scarlet Letter, The Good Soldier and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, among other books; they will hardly afford him opportunities to say much more. So the novel, like bourgeois marriage, its central theme, has its emotional limits. Within them, it will enact the themes of property and family, the great ...”

“... this, but lets the ignorant heroine attend the infertility clinic for a year before some friendly lady gynaecologist breaks the male conspiracy of lies. Sadie’s rebellion is to fake cancer and have her left breast removed. The cruel inversion of male-pandering cosmetic surgery properly mortifies Tim, whom Sadie takes – wrongly, as a final irony reveals ...”

“... as themselves a fiction which cannot apply even to fictional life. An amusingly gothic old lady, Miss Maud, forms an instance of a person removed from normality by her insistence on privacy: ‘The only way to be free is to create a world of one’s own.’ Ruth sees the need finally for realistic self-appraisal held in a steadying balance with ...”

“... descent on both sides of the family, he inherited the Court connections of his mother, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. At the age of 12 he was a Page of Honour to George V and in the late 1940s Private Secretary to Princess Elizabeth. From Harrow, and Trinity College, Cambridge, he entered the diplomatic service the year before Munich, and ...”

“... frizzy hair and a thrift-shop outfit. Thus, we have a couple of archetypal scene-stealers – dog lady and dog – and the slightly stuffy accomplice needed to set them off. It adds up to an entertaining piece of fiction. Virginia Moriconi has written an odd novel about the Irish and Anglo-Irish. Her heroine is a guileless young American academic, named ...”

“... to be used throughout the year, rather than as last-minute revision crammers’.) The British Lady Chatterley trial was not ‘in the 1950s’, and I doubt if many playwrights of the Sixties (or since) would agree that ‘the winning of that case by the publishers marked an effective end to censorship of the arts in Great Britain.’ Perhaps because of ...”

“... herself merry with her own unceremoniousness’? Her brother, after all, had been seducing a young lady in France, where he had lived in a lofty rapture, as he was now doing – though with different ambitions and intentions – with his sister at Alfoxden Park near Nether Stowey. At all times of idealistic fervour it is the women who lose out. Where they are ...”

“... the Matisse poster’), not to mention his Muse (Uta, a tall, blond, good-looking Scandinavian lady whom he meets in Milan), are writing the story in half the chapters, while a group of New Zealand-based characters are enacting it in the other half. One’s first response to such Modernist chic is to find it passé. Still, the strategy makes for a buoyant ...”

“... on the whole runs well, and it is enlivened by pretty quotations. (Chuang-tzu: ‘Men say that the Lady Di is beautiful; but if the fish could see her they would dive to the bottom of the river.’) But it is demanding. Schwartz assumes that you know the geography of China and are reasonably familiar with the outlines of its early history; and he presupposes ...”

“... wonderful light, Bill,’ I said to the Texan next to me. ‘Yes,’ he affirmed; and the Indian lady murmured: ‘Yes.’ Three exiles. No more was said; and the others, Londoners, did not even know what we had understood ... When people ask, I feel like saying ‘It’s a brilliant country; they’re a brilliant people, just at the beginning of the ...”