“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”