“... 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 ...”

“... pointed ears. In the Vellati chapel of the Church of Santo Spirito, help is again at hand – Our Lady of Succour is taking a club to a dragon-winged devil covered with orange hair, with a scaly tail and dagger-like canines. He is reaching out a pronged tool to hook a frightened child. So the devil embodies all the wickedness lying in wait for the innocent of ...”

“... lire. With an embarrassed smile, Giovanni tells me that his father built a house here for an old lady – it had a large garden, three storeys and a lift – whose income derived entirely from the sale of these trinkets. I come from a Methodist background, and I’m uneasy with icons and relics, but my objections here are mainly aesthetic – too many ...”

“... manqué.) The odd woman out during Carlyle’s frequent absences in the flattering society of Lady Ashburton and her aristocratic circle, Jane actually contemplated leaving him in the mid-Forties, a drastic step – for the time – from which she was dissuaded only by the advice of their friend Mazzini. Where Kaplan is content to describe, Phyllis Rose ...”

“... of Arab horsemen defeating Persians at the battle of Al-Qadissiya (AD 637). It is in the style of Lady Butler painting British cavalry engagements in the last century. This painting forms the outer circle: the inner circle is of sand, realistically strewn with ancient armour, the helmets and weapons of the fallen. The greenjackets wanted to remind us that ...”

“... sinks a little: ‘by herself and Barnet Litvinoff’ seems to imply the indulgence of a grand old lady’s imperious vanity. ‘Russia was untamed and beautiful, disciplined yet ungovernable ...’ What, 229 pages of that? Yes, but she quickly wins the reader over by her courage, her curiosity, her keen sense of irony, and even by her racy, chiaroscuro ...”

“... disparate episodes: an anonymous phone call in New York, bizarre conjunctions, an affair with Lady Q., a bit of bohemian life in London – ‘In Francis Bacon’s queer after-hours club’ – and one Pericles Belleville. At a very formal dinner party, At which I met the woman I have loved the most In my life, Belleville Pulled out a sterling ...”

“... poet, Shakespeare or Racine, in Magnus Merriman, for example, or the mockheroic battle between Lady Lysistrata’s female warriors and the British Army in The Impregnable Women, or the farcical sequence in the dark at a Hollywood party where Juan proposes in quick succession, inadvertently each time, to a pair of identical extras called Jill and ...”

“... Rota, as Enrico, proved himself a master of the art of shouting.’ ‘There is a lady [in the Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha’s opera Santa Chiara] in whom “pride of rank transcendeth”, who is poisoned by her husband. She dies temporarily, after the manner of Juliet, is canonised, and appears subsequently as a saint, after which her husband ...”

“... scrambling of high and low ranks, like the juxtaposition of ‘Pimps, Poets, Wits, Lord Fanny’s, Lady Mary’s’, and I think they indicate more than ‘Pope’s special tendency ... to cast into doubt the proper association of rank with merit, virtue, or even good manners’. They are a matter of putting lords down in lordly language, though in the name of ...”