“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”