“... 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 ...”

“... did that awful thing described in the ‘Salad Days’ section of My Life as a Man to a young lady under the ping-pong table, yelping ‘good shot’ and ‘nice return’ to allay her parents next door, will be disappointed. The Facts contains not a single lavatorial or sex scene. No family liver is profaned. Roth, being Roth, cannot keep the facts he ...”

“... control. They have preferred to lobby and telephone and issue threats behind the scenes. The Iron Lady, however, prefers more direct methods. Hence the packing of the BBC’s Board of Governors, the appointment of reliable trusties to the chairmanship and deputy chairmanship of the BBC, the destruction of the ITV monopoly, the draconian replacement proposed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”