“... director of the Royal College of Music, and on his liking for women students, especially a young lady who evidently became a musical power in Dublin, a pianist called Edith Oldham. The virtue-laden mutton-chop whiskers of Victorian photographs offer a great temptation to debunk. Grove had an unhappy marriage. His wife, he claimed, was cold and, worse, took ...”

“... of many things, and would not lift a finger to move a bucket of coal if there was an old lady on hand to do it. But surely he should have had the OM? The brothers seem to have been agreed on this point. And the Nobel Prize for Literature? Snow ‘could not be blamed for hoping’. A year or two earlier Private Eye had scurrilously suggested that ...”

“... is the dramatic figure of these early years. She seems to have a been pleasant, rather scatty lady who became less pleasant and more scatty after falling in love with a neighbour’s son considerably younger than herself. In those far-off days the affair did not immediately – or indeed at all – lead to fornication, but there were inevitable domestic ...”

“... sister-in-law, Alyse Gregory, writes with some annoyance about the marriage: this American lady novelist, editor of the Dial, liked to take T.F. on country walks, with intellectual discussions, and complains that ‘he has had to live his life with a woman who shares none of his tastes, none of his thoughts ...’ Nevertheless, the slightly jealous ...”

“... seeks to become chaplain to the Imperial Court and the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld becomes the lady-in-waiting of the Empress Josephine (formerly Rose Tascher). After a short time, the whole system collapses. We are considering only a few years in the history of France and Europe, even though Napoleon fought 60 battles and lived with great ...”

“... Monsignor Knox comes to work on Russell’s farm: ‘Has anyone got a farm like mine? In one field Lady Wey[mouth] doing Shepherdess to my flock and in another a Monsignor of the Roman Church pulling and topping swedes.’ The Church seems to be crowding in on him. A monk comes to stay. ‘When I light the bedroom candles he says: “O I haven’t said my ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and sympathetic commentators may be reminded of those who dutifully spoke for the defence at the Lady Chatterley trial while feeling that it was a bad book. Frank Kermode, writing of what he approvingly termed ‘decreative’ Modernist poets in a 1966 essay on T.S. Eliot, suggested that one way of recognising them ‘is by a certain ambiguity in your own ...”

“... the latter.’ This is dangerously true. The idle or incompetent doctor, presented with an old lady suffering from aches and pains, or shortness of breath, or difficulty with memory, is tempted to collude with the general perception and say ‘It’s your age, dear’ rather than diagnose osteo-arthritis, cardiac failure or the adverse effects of ...”

“... a new triplet in the Prologue: The country lip may have the velvet touch; Though she’s no lady you may think her such, (A strong imagination may do much.) Such ease is all the more remarkable because Dryden’s first efforts were decidedly clumsy, although they demonstrate the instant ability to make use of every poetic style then current, from ...”

“... his social superiors. He deplored loose talk at official meetings and was much shocked to hear a Lady Robinson say, of one of a batch of prisoners: ‘I could break a commandment with him.’ He resented a Navy Commissioner’s ‘maid and whore’ being placed in his church pew. Yet the hypocrite had moral courage of a strange kind, as when he fired off a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than others, and there is a dispiriting amount of antiquing going on, as in ‘My garments, good lady,’ and ‘I was a poor servant girl, possessed nothing but the curse of youthful beauty,’ and ‘The old fellow has essayed too much this time.’ This doesn’t stop the old fellow wearing a parka, so you wonder how Wideman is seeing these scenes. But ...”