“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but the supporting cast – brilliant willowy Edmund, working-class Marxist Alan, aristocratic Lady Fanthorpe, and so on – are cardboard. The Sixties setting is painted by numbers: dolly-birds and miniskirts, boys that look like ‘Terry’ Stamp, much twisting to early Beatles songs. At its worst, the book’s assertions are either palpably absurd ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dame of American letters, deferentially hired by Ford to suggest names for new models. The great lady glitters into a world wholly composed of things. ‘I have a knife held by two nails flat to the casing of my kitchen china closet. It has a blade about eight inches long, of high-grade steel, joined to an ebony handle by a collar of brass – trade-marked ...”

“... built a gabled house in this Arctic community, and even acquired a wife. ‘My wife is a very nice lady,’ he told me, as a rather cowed-looking figure in a rough woollen dress shuffled about in the background. ‘She runs a store and gives me money every few days.’ ‘Oh, really,’ I said, desperate to clutch at these straws of domesticity. ‘And ...”

“... with the ambassadress of saltpetre Or of the white curve on black ground we call thought … The lady with no shadow knelt on the Pont-au-Change Rue Gît-le-Coeur the stamps were no longer the same Night-time pledges were kept at last Homing pigeons helping kisses Met with the breasts of the lovely stranger Pointing through the crepe of perfect meanings A ...”

“... prejudices of those less fastidious than himself. His story about the (forever unidentified) old lady who had ‘excreta pushed through her letterbox’, also has her being followed to the shops by ‘children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies’. Powell was dismissed from the shadow cabinet. He spent the next two decades on the back benches, from which ...”