“... two retinues got out of hand. When hogsheads of French wine were washed up at Preston in Sussex, Lady Shirley asked her steward to send them up to London ‘so we may drink it, which will end the dispute with the commissions of the customs’.When goods went missing it was always easy to blame the people who actually heaved them from the sea. Sir John ...”

“... felicitous accretive consequences: the suburbs of Brussels; Aachen cathedral; Albi cathedral; Our Lady of Bruges; the Fahle Building in Tallinn. These are exceptions to the rule of the Olympic Park pile-up, which is what happens when an environmental liability such as le gougnafier (Macron’s nickname for the Prime Shit Emeritus) seeks its precious ...”

“... Henry Ash in a copy of one of Ash’s books in the London Library. The letters address an unknown lady; they are suggestive of intellectual, and perhaps other kinds of passion; and Roland, from motives obscure to himself but none the less compelling, steals them. He does not tell Blackadder; he does not tell Val, the woman with whom he damply and gloomily ...”

“... stunning girl with the blonde halo? Can it be possible she is still alive? So the lovely, fat old lady, resurrected, becomes a staple of film festivals. She is in a position of absolute security. Fame has come too late to bewilder or corrupt; it can only console. She is something better than a star. She is an eternal flame in the holy church of cinema. Brooks ...”

“... when he wrote a goodbye letter to his wife he assured her that her successor would also be ‘a ...”

“... you’d notice. It got worse, though, and on the last morning, when we were caught by the two old lady teachers, we were beating his bare legs with the coiled-up straps. Though we’d set out on time that morning we were late, having spent the best part of half an hour on top of an out-of-the-way railway bridge practically skinning the screaming boy’s ...”

“... quite obviously not enough. It is extraordinary that anyone can have thought, as some followers of Lady Thatcher have thought and perhaps in a few cases still do think, that mere equality in the face of the market could realise enough of an idea of equal citizenship to make anything work, including the market itself. Sen’s theory of equality does yield an ...”

“... episode that almost everyone would consider as in itself sexist, the trick Panurge plays upon the Lady of Paris who refuses his advances? He sprinkles her gown with ground-up pieces of genitals of a bitch in heat and then withdraws to watch the sport, as all the male dogs of Paris assemble to piss on her, head to toe ... Her offence, remember, is simply that ...”

“... from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who welcomed Strachey, ‘would no more have invited Carrington than the cook’. Knowing her very well, he thought she was a complex and original character in a strange situation, but did not say what effect on her the strange situation had. Dora ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and so to James Bond. Finally the phrase ‘pre-Thatcherite’ enables Dr Morgan to return to the lady in question. This is sleight-of-hand – but for a purpose. The mystique of empire is introduced as a preamble to the success of Mrs Thatcher, a page or two later, in mobilising the forces of popular patriotism. What Dr Morgan has done, with great ...”

“... another woman was involved. Some assumed it was Dickens’s sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth. This lady suffered the indignity of a virginity test, to disprove what would have been incest as well as adultery. Those closer to Dickens knew better. ‘No such thing – it’s with an actress,’ Thackeray told his mother, adding: ‘It’s a fatal story for our ...”

“... only for breeding. It is organised round the red bedroom of its queen, the obese and languid Lady Alabaster, who spends the day in idle deshabille, while endless lines of maidservants dressed in black scuttle back and forth from the kitchen bearing sweetmeats and beverages. By the end of the book, Eugenia, too, has become a mere breeding creature, an ...”

“... When I began teaching in the early Sixties, my salary was £1,000 and the newly-published Penguin Lady Chatterley’s Lover cost 3s 6d. New Penguin novels now cost £5 – a nearly thirtyfold increase. By that index, starting academic salaries should be £28,000 (which they are in the best American colleges). The first property I bought was a New Town ...”

“... male bluster masquerading as chivalry. When Mervyn Griffith-Jones put his famous question to the Lady Chatterley trial jury about the reading-matter appropriate to wives and servants, he may have had in mind the criteria applied by a Sunday Times editor in 1949 to The Naked and the Dead. ‘No decent man could leave it lying about the house,’ the paper had ...”