“... journey into the darkness of the past. The details of Salisbury’s character, as given by Lady Gwendolen, match the scenes of Disraeli in his letters. Disraeli was not comfortable with nature, and especially not with horses; nor was Salisbury, who was eventually saved by the tricycle. Disraeli could see everything in a room, but nothing outside ...”

“... Cordelia’s terrifying power is at last cancelled through the intervention of a divinity, ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Help’, taking the shape of the Virgin Mary. Elaine at last comes to understand the nature of this deity, as she sees into the heart of Cordelia’s malice and is able to forgive. She is released. But Cat’s Eye is not a sentimental novel, nor ...”

“... service that suits their own needs. At these clinics, a nominal fee is charged in order to avoid a Lady Bountiful, charitable image of health care, and to call attention to the joint share of physicians and patients in the fashioning of a community-based system of social medicine. Community or regional health systems have been established in other ...”

“... in a particularly subversive act of cataloguing, Edith Holden’s Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady has been granted the same classmark as the biographies of Einstein and the memoirs of local Nobel Prize-winners from Rutherford to Mott. In Georgina Ferry’s account, the career of Dorothy Hodgkin (née Crowfoot) stands at first sight as a cheering contrast ...”

“... acquired a tendency to fall in love with every woman that I meet,’ he tells one unperturbed lady. The familiar Storeyan CV is reviewed as the ghosts crowd in. Fenchurch has dialogues with his miner father, who explains: ‘I’ve tried to save you from working on your belly eight hours of the day or night, with two hundred yards of rock above your ...”

“... 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 ...”