“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gowns’), he met not only Castro but the ‘strong, vital, buoyant’ Che Guevara and ‘a lady with a sad, beautiful face’, whom he and Nowell recognised as Dolores Ibárruri, better known as La Pasionaria. He was among his own people, big people. His admiration for Communism was inseparable from his worship of power. Not for nothing was The ...”

“... of reform’ and may have been implicated (with other members of his family) in support for Lady Jane Grey and in Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary of 1553-54: perhaps this was one of the reasons he fled England shortly afterwards. No less formative was the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, when thousands of Protestants were slaughtered by ...”

“... but also to show off. Her agent remembered Wilder’s drafts as the narration of a ‘fine old lady … sitting in a rocking chair and telling a story chronologically but with no benefit of perspective or theatre’ until Lane intervened, adding dialogue, cutting and rearranging scenes, getting rid of characters or turning them into composites. To add ...”