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“... became the most popular playwright of the Edwardian age. There were a few false starts, but Lady Frederick was an unexpected hit in 1907, and soon he had four plays running simultaneously in London. Most of his drawing-room comedies have been forgotten, although The Constant Wife, The Circle and For Services Rendered are said to stand up quite well. And ...”

“... in the year, has learned some new poems. So in the darkness of a Penarth bedroom this 90-year-old lady recites Housman’s ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ and Browning’s ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’. And not a fluff in either.8 August. It is the day after the Tottenham riots and waiting for a prescription in the pharmacy in Camden High Street I ...”

“... Bill Styron becomes the literary darling of Camelot, yachting with the president and the First Lady, who dispense with formalities. ‘We were sitting around a big table in the open cockpit and occasionally she would put her feet up in JFK’s lap and wiggle her toes, just like you’d imagine the wife of the president to do.’ With his famous bugle-call ...”

“... names by contrast were mostly transparent: King Aelfraed sounded like ‘King Elf-Counsel’, Lady Aethelflaed ‘Lady Noble Beauty’, King Aethelraed ‘King Noble Counsel’. Ancient Greek names were much closer to those of pre-Conquest than post-Conquest England. Just as we translate Native American names such as ...”

“... momentarily consider turning back. ‘We will proceed no further in this business,’ he tells Lady Macbeth, to which she replies: ‘Was the hope drunk/wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since? … Art thou afeard/to be the same in thine own act and valour/as thou art in desire?’ There is no acknowledgment of Macbeth’s misgivings, only ...”

“... ships, such as Plover, Herald, Enterprise, Investigator, Resolute, Intrepid, Assistance, Pioneer, Lady Franklin, Sophia, Felix, Advance, Rescue, Prince Albert, Isabel, Phoenix, Talbot, Fox. Then there are innumerable place-names, often the names of powerful personages scattered around the Arctic wastes like confetti and made confusing by repetition: Viscount ...”

“... outside the windows, and you could smell them. There were insects, too. Good insects, crickets and lady-bugs. Owens had purchased ten thousand and released them into the yard.’ This is the dream squared: though Owens is not a media mogul, he has something of the absurd hubris of the great days of Hollywood, the world of colossal, innocent artifice. He keeps ...”

“... family we know that this went on for some time. The leading member of the next generation, Lady Grisell Baillie, whose household books have long been known, had a remarkably rapid turnover of servants. Some stayed only one night, and the average length of stay has been calculated at three weeks. One explanation is readily available from the social ...”

“... a century earlier, the most famous mesmeric invalid had been Harriet Martineau, a powerful single lady and popular journalist. She had had to take to her bed with what was believed to be uterine cancer, and was eventually persuaded to try mesmeric healing. After a number of treatments from different people her health improved dramatically; more, she underwent ...”

“... rather than inverted commas, are largely banal, as are the other conversations which the old lady holds with her female companion. But a mystery, dealing with two broken marriages, emerges between the half-lines. Why did the old lady’s husband desert her, after some unspecified misconduct in Italy? Why has her son ...”

“... and New College? Not on your life. One of the ironies of the whole episode was that the Iron Lady’s champions appealed to a set of conventions that she had done more than any other British politician to consign to the dustbin. Those who sow conviction politics must also reap them. Indeed our vote was not a snub at all, but an accolade, a recognition ...”

“... The only bad thing is the effect on Mrs Krantz’s personality. Until lately she was a nice Jewish lady harbouring the usual bourgeois fancies about the aristocracy. But now she gives interviews extolling her own hard head. ‘Like so many of us,’ she told the Daily Mail on 28 April, ‘I happen to believe that being young, beautiful and rich is more ...”

“... meant settling up, and the master sex counted out cash for the groceries in the knowledge that the lady might bolt with it. A drinker himself, he believed that ‘a woman who drank was not to be trusted.’ A loner, he had no trouble in taking strange women back to his flat and ‘cohabiting’ with them. Encounters and friendships of this kind open the ...”

“... lesbian, gaining full sway over lifeboat and crew and proclaiming the rule of women! This lady (presented in A Night to Remember as particularly efficient and helpful during the rescue) lakes her place in the poem as part of a transsexual montage which includes ‘the veiled millionaire disguised as a woman’ (Lord says ‘third-class passenger ...”

“... If SS Jerome or Ambrose or Augustine or any of the grim Fathers had been watching television in spring this year, they wouldn’t have had much trouble seeing Marlene Dietrich for what she was. Those lids, those lips, that pillowy mink, those sidelong glances, those shimmering legs and – above all – that voice, would have rendered her lightly accented modern English as plain as the Latin of the Mass to the patriarchs and their friends and forerunners in the penitential Thebaid ...”