“... Diana Cooper to think of him as boringly tethered by fatherhood. He would also not have wished his lady-friend’s attention to be distracted from his own interesting personal development. Even so, it does seem that his dislike of young Auberon was genuine, (‘I think I must have been a difficult child to like,’ says the obliging Bron. And here, too, he was ...”

“... new and stylish ideological fantasy, notably in the recast tales of The Bloody Chamber. Her ‘Lady of the House of Love’, one of the items in this wide-ranging anthology, begins by making a skilfully precise use of the Gothic standby in which normality and enlightenment seem to have triumphed, but can one be quite sure? ‘At last the revenants became ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... you felt you must be guilty, even though you did not know your crime.’ I asked the elderly lady in the coffee house of the Paris Hotel in Prague what had got better and what had got worse since the velvet revolution. ‘Everything has got worse and will get worse still,’ she replied, ‘except for one thing. For the first time in fifty years I do not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... abode in Surrey. He replied that he only went to stay at other people’s houses with his wife (Lady Dorothy, daughter of the Duke of Devonshire). Silence ensued. He never spent a night at Cherkeley, though he never quarrelled with Lord Beaverbrook. The fascinating problem about the careers of those who get to the top in politics is the turning-point, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cripple than this tough, resourceful, resilient, responsible, dashing, candid and very funny lady; or look less like one. The portrait photograph on the jacket was taken when she was 92: she looks a spry 60, with a squashy Russian nose in a broad Russian face, untidy hair, and a most appealing expression in which serenity and benevolent curiosity ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”