“... the world and staying in it. When, late in the book, Jill encounters her grandmother, the old lady suggests she should move on. Maybe it’s time, Grandma said, indicating my grave with her cane … No, I said. Why not, Grandma said. What keeps you here, Doll? What keeps you here? I said. She leaned forward to answer, as if about to tell me some ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... resent, dislike and try to despise. It is characterisation as assassination, the portrait of a lady who’s already dead, or at least moribund. Poised on the stairs, she’s Lolita’s doomed mother, who is introduced in exactly the same setting, smoking the same cigarette, as ‘a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich’. Béa is a weak solution of Lauren ...”

“... did as she pleased, though she was ruthlessly hard to please. Moore became a cult figure, the old lady in the tricorne hat who threw the first pitch of the baseball season, went to prize fights with George Plimpton, dined with Cassius Clay, as he then was, and was hired, unavailingly, to give a name to a new Ford car. On the whole people think rather little ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... suffragette era (see, for example, Mellors’s denunciation of his first wife’s beaked vagina in Lady Chatterley’s Lover). However, comradely love would eschew penetration, being limited to the intimacies meticulously defined in the wrestling match between Birkin and Gerald. Lawrence further underlined this point by his portrait of degenerate Eros in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Julian Critchley, one of the Whitbread judges, wrote an article in which he blamed the ‘Corps of Lady Novelists’ for her victory. The book, he said, ‘resembles the Life of Jackie Charlton as written by Beryl Bainbridge’. He clearly meant this as a huge insult – but to whom? Interviewers who had not had time to look at the book went to see Atkinson ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fan, a schmoozer. Imagine if Orson Welles had never bothered to direct films again after The Lady from Shanghai, just bullshitted on talk shows, reliving his great moments. Like Welles, Stan Lee’s great moments were beset by authorship disputes. Lee’s particular emphasis on Spider-Man as Marvel’s signature creation may have had something to do with ...”