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“... The proceedings have moved towards their conclusion. The bearded poets and the grey-haired lady biographers have stamped their furry feet at the Minister for Rabbits, who has handled them firmly with his velveteen gloves. The genial Dickensian chairman is winding up the session in tones that tell us it’s all just a game but please do stay and join ...”

“... and Whittall believe the phrase should be read as ‘purely friendly relationship to the young lady’. This is much too unambiguous. Wagner’s phrase need not be taken to mean that his relationship was chaste. Doubtless he was teasing Cosima as he dictated. R.J. Hollingdale’s translation of Nietzsche’s four essays, Untimely Meditations, on the other ...”

“... noisily fights his way up a sort of staircase overcrowded with knicker-dropping moppets, bulging lady neighbours, telephone wankers, bottom-pinchers, whores with clicking heels, movie-mad nymphettes with skinny arms, frayed old pederasts; over ankles and wrists, up black and brown calves and shoulders and breasts he struggles to reach at last the Great ...”

“... inwardly he was all adrift. He decided that he should get a wife, so he wrote to an unattached lady in Dublin whom he remembered from student days, proposing marriage. She hadn’t the faintest recollection of him, but she was living in dire poverty with her sister and took up his offer at once. They married in 1845; twenty-five years later, one quiet ...”

“... than simply manipulative). It is very disappointing to find that she has so little to say on the Lady Dhuoda, a noblewoman of the ninth century who wrote a book of moral precepts for her son. Dr McKitterick says that the book shows Dhuoda as being ‘well-read and cultured’, but we really ought to be given an idea of the nature of that culture. It is a ...”

“... technique with the governing boards may be guessed by reading a recent newspaper letter from Lady Cottesloe, commending her husband’s skill in dealing with ‘that lovable prima donna, Laurence Olivier’. Olivier has also written a book, Confessions of an Actor, in which he confesses that he was displeased at being succeeded, without consultation, by ...”

“... shabby infidelities on both sides, all the hopes they have buried. Lyubov’s mother, a literary lady who writes highbrow fairy tales, explains at one point her daughters’ names, making an unintentional epigram as she does so. The girls are Lyubov and Vera. ‘Their names mean Love and Faith. There isn’t any Hope.’ There is a splendid literary birthday ...”

“... and his entourage were spending the night. ‘But why did Lord Oda love Ranmaru, why not a pretty lady?’ I must have asked, for I remember my father’s reply and he is a man of impeccable morality and character: ‘A woman would have asked him to stay at home and die on a sleeping mat and that would have been against his Way of Man.’ Given the ceaseless ...”

“... or adopted, are ‘looking for our mother of myth and fairy-tale, the mother of all religions, Our Lady, Mother Earth, every unfulfilled wish’, she is paying this idea lip service only. Her sympathy is clearly with the blood mother, the legitimate mother, the mother who is stuck to her child with a glue that cannot become unstuck. Underlying everything ...”

“... that attracts so strongly, for this novel won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. We begin with the old lady talking about her ‘ravaged’ face, which an old man tells her he prefers to her girlish face – which, she says, was ‘a face that foretold the one I acquired through drink in middle age ... I acquired that drinker’s face before I drank. Drink only ...”

“... was like a nuclear explosion.’ (‘He thought she was using a simile,’ we are told.) In Lady Oracle the narrator, a specialist in bodice-rippers or ‘costume Gothics’, confided that ‘maybe I’ll try some science fiction. The future doesn’t appeal to me as much as the past, but I’m sure it’s better for you.’ The future in literary ...”

“... paths defined by rigorous theological systems which the believer must comprehend. As the Puritan Lady Brilliana Harley explained to her son, ‘Luther had great fears until he had thoroughly learned the doctrine of justification by Christ alone, and so it will be with all of us: no peace shall we have in our own righteousness.’ Theology had its own ...”

“... more momentous than suppressed desire, a suppressed memory of suppressed desire, for the young lady, glimpsed fleetingly from the rear as she left the premises ...’ His slippery ellipsis. For all the pipe-smoking persona, this is Harris twee. William Empson is praised for magnanimous agility on one page, and then on the very next page, à propos of ...”

“... think Aides should be forbidden to write books about their Generals.’ Even Eisenhower’s lady driver stuck her pen into Monty. The major onslaughts came in the memoirs of the American generals themselves, provoking more-in-sorrow letters of protest from the field-marshal. In Britain, however, the legend of his leadership remained inviolate. It was a ...”

“... even in their own homes. He listened attentively to the views of Mary Alice Salvidge, an old lady who moved her house piece by piece from one county to another rather than see it demolished to make way for a road. A collection of essays on these and similar topics makes for an interesting pot-pourri. Intermittently Wright displays many of the qualities ...”