“... and his stepfather, George Wyndham, a Byronically dashing soldier-poet. Bend’Or’s mother, Lady Sibell Lumley, was so beautiful – although, some felt, a bit silly – she was the toast of London: her brother said that after her first husband’s early death 80 men were in love with her. After being unhappy at prep school (where he was, as the ...”

“... sort of person from Richard Hoggart, ‘the grammar school extramural lecturer’ who at the Lady Chatterley trial succeeded, to the amazement and amusement of Our Age, in putting down ‘the Treasury counsel from Eton and Cambridge’. The single most irritating thing about this book is the constant prosopopoeic repetition of the expression ‘Our ...”

“... myself’: also she wanted the messenger alive, to hear from him that Octavia was old and ugly. Lady Macbeth would have killed Duncan as he slept, except that he resembled her father; she did at least incriminate the grooms by smearing them with blood, though later she was troubled with thick-coming fancies that kept her from her rest. And in real, recent ...”

“... freed from the tiresome necessity of ever doing any real work. Amanda Cross’s Kate Fansler is a lady of private means and an English professor at Columbia to boot, so that is her excuse for living the life of Reilly. But both Wilson and Dunant’s heroines are unattached bohemians who have the street-credible attitudes of the poor, while appearing to live ...”

“... just seen his mistress through a bad abortion, the other writing two letters daily to the young lady who was about to ditch him for a (rather younger) member of his Cabinet. However, though his positions are more defensible, since they allow him to claim less in practice than he hints at in theory, they do not actually help Clarke answer his ‘question of ...”

“... vast stone edifice filled with Scribes and Pharisees: it is an intimate domestic interior. The old lady behind the boy is in a bed, perhaps a day-bed – you can see bed-curtains, not to mention a night-cap; she is conceivably Joseph’s mother, Rachel, who bore him very late in life (though she was actually dead by this stage of Joseph’s existence). The ...”

“... weakened it (‘I always thought we went a bridge too far’), but it was the conclusive line. Lady Browning was not satisfied, however; according to her, Dirk Bogarde, playing her husband, said it in a murmur. On his retirement from the Army Boy was appointed Comptroller of Princess Elizabeth’s household and spent the rest of his working life at ...”

“... impact on the future. The great Maastricht debate was mainly prosecuted by politicians who, from Lady Thatcher downwards, believed it was the moment to fix a Maginot line beyond which the previous momentum for integration would not pass. The terms of the argument they made therefore tended to be inward-looking and, above all, anachronistic. They worried more ...”

“... of his mistresses, the woman a willing but ofttupped victim, while a third, the belaboured lady’s sister, naps beneath the bouncing bed where she’s been staying out of love’s way until tale-time comes and she can clear her throat to request a bit of post-coital edification and escape. Sex doesn’t save the women the King beds. Their cries of ...”

“... until his terminal illness and the great success of 1984. Connolly tended to implore the previous lady to take him back after it was too late. He and Barbara Skelton quarrelled violently in the car on the way to their wedding and their way back from it; and he was soon desperately telegraphing Lys to come and rescue him. The redoubtable Barbara, who had been ...”

“... chapter, on the Balunda plebiscite, describes the end of. Two characters have an interest in Lady Butler, the Victorian military painter, and much of the plot gathers around the comical but sinister figure of Colonel Rimington, who stayed on in Balunda after Independence to become a henchman of the new dictator. When he reappears in Europe, with a ...”

“... an unwanted respectability. There were also fears that macho Dylan fans (those who believe ‘Lay Lady Lay’ to be the jewel in the canon) would not tolerate feminist questioning of Dylan’s love-songs. In the event, these anxieties were unfounded, apart from one or two spluttering interventions. The meeting of two different kinds of preoccupation with ...”

“... in Islington, the highlight of which was the entry of a nervous, near-naked strip-o-gram lady who sat on Neil’s knee and slowly removed his shirt and vest. While everyone else hovered on the edge of death by embarrassment, Neil, according to one unlucky lunching companion, ‘looked entirely at home’. It fitted his image of himself. Later in the ...”

“... have been behind FDR New Deal progress and against the self-indulgent obscurantism of the old lady. Now, even the TVA man, in the appealing person of Montgomery Cift, falls victim, not only to the old lady’s granddaughter (Lee Remick), but to the ‘rugged individualism’ of grandma’s stand. Here Kazan’s ...”

“... actress. Not on stage or in her films, but in life, where she was both director and leading lady and could get away with anything. Other people orbiting around her were assigned the minor parts. ‘After all,’ she mumbled, as she was dying, ‘it so happens that I have genius. I’m used to it now.’ Adler met Marguerite Duras in prose before meeting ...”