“... 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 ...”

“... for her own identity’. One doubts whether Sonya saw it like that. She was no West Coast lady, and though she had problems, they were quite different from the problems of Judy Garland and Vivien Leigh, whose lives Ms Edwards has also written. What was she like? The new portrait does not differ from the older ones: she was a lively, pretty, highly ...”

“... bred this precarious civility. But there is enough unpalliated horror in the chapter about the Lady Doctor: we hear of a baby without an anus, left in an outhouse (euphemism for latrine) to die, and of the box of clean ashes placed beside the birth bed in case the baby was a girl: suffocation by the midwife or a relative was ‘very easy’. The account of ...”

“... one encounters them, even in trifling matters, the more beloved they become, the squire and his lady, the Bacons, the Donnes (descended from the poet), the Du Quesnes, the Howes, his Sister Pounsett, and hundreds more – all immersed in farming and shipping and parties and funerals and talking very little about money. Naturally, Parson Woodforde is at his ...”

“... destroyers. So, we have Lily, twice widowed in Vietnam (a misfortune that seems to call for a Lady Bracknell to comment on it), finding solace in thoughts of Ancient Egypt and the cult of Isis, and finally making it to Cairo on her third – reluctant – honeymoon. ‘Third Time Lucky’ is the ironic title. In ‘People to People’ a group of ...”

“... He said the boy wouldn’t have much to do in the way of work, just be a companion for the old lady. It would mean one less mouth to feed, Grandma explained. So, aged eight, Bert was sent off to work. From daylight to dark, he was kept busy feeding the pigs and fowls, minding the sheep, milking the cows. Paid nothing but his keep, his clothes turning to ...”

“... has a central role but is passive compared to minor characters like his grandmother, a sparky lady who manages to fool the doctor and rise from the dead – on the funeral pyre, after the fire has been lit on her chest – the genial terrorist Jagadish, and the charmingly brusque heroine Bharati. These were followed by such novels as The Guide and The ...”

“... with a male detective in mind: it was only in the course of writing that the pterodactyl-like lady, twice widowed, and a psychoanalyst by profession, took over. Mrs Bradley – who is apt to provoke a suspect by giving him a good poke in the ribs – is nothing if not unorthodox in her investigative procedures. The early Mitchell novels (some of which ...”

“... monologue ‘in the manner of Browning’, according to the author’s wife and biographer Lady Ferguson, which imagines the musings and misgivings of an Invincible recruit and participant in the Phoenix Park murders of 1882. From this point, we come up pretty swiftly to the modern age, via Yeats, Synge, Francis Ledwidge, Padraig Colum and one or two ...”

“... recognises, partly because he is spending much of his time thinking about Generosa, his ‘Cuban lady’. Gradually the delicate balance between reality, memory and dream shifts in favour of the latter pair, and by the final pages the fusion is complete: the old man cuts loose and drifts off into a reality that no one would dare call confused or ...”

“... no poem issues from that sentiment, though he resorts to Venice, Vienna, Berlin, Lisbon and even Lady Gregory’s Coole Park to provoke it. Traipsing around Germany after the war, he consigned to his notebook the hope that ‘old Europe’ wouldn’t be let die. Many of his poems are in praise of continuity: For continuity, A place of your own Where ...”