“... her study of the novel in verse Barbara Gelpi has even seen the villainous and sexually predatory Lady Waldemar, who arranges Marian’s abduction and rape, as Aurora’s Jungian ‘shadow’. Certainly Aurora first accepts and then rejects the idea of independent woman plus child represented by Marian, wishing to be ‘low and wise’, ‘less known and less ...”

“... the marriage stakes is William Ashcombe. At the age of 17, he ‘was much importuned to marry my Lady Garrard’s daughter’ – ‘I saw her and no more.’ At 18, he was offered Kate Howard, but ‘being half afraid of the greatness of her spirit I did not’. At 19, ‘I was wished unto a fine gentlewoman’ – ‘upon further acquaintance I ...”

“... GM techniques, as much as organic farming, are supposed to consign to history. (In 1962, the first lady of environmentalism, Rachel Carson, was enthusiastic, for just this reason, about the potential of the bio-insecticide B.t., now reviled for its alleged effect on certain butterflies.) Nor would my futurologist have witnessed the Third World famines of ...”

“... idea of the restaurant at the end of the Universe is not a new one.) The tavern is run by an old lady, who dishes out ale, and in one version advice: eat, drink and be merry, and forget things which do not concern you. This character, who would not be out of place in a television soap opera, is sometimes equated with a minor goddess known as Shiduri. Only ...”

“... past. You shall see and hear more of her in due time.’ ‘I should love to hear all about the lady Ruth,’ the old gentleman replies with burning curiosity, adding the uncertain encouragement that ‘no ex-housemaster, unless he is a fool, is bad at preserving secrets.’ This is half-way through the correspondence. It brings the reply: ‘I shall ...”

“... Harold Evans does at least refer to), especially now. ‘What would you pay to get all of Lady Fuddington off page three, sport?’ Or as John Walter’s man Finey used to say, pocketing the guineas, ‘Give me a few more, and by St Patrick I will knock out the brains of anyone in our office who dares ever whisper your name.’ Much of the book is ...”

“... 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 ...”