“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... large, ungainly, half-deaf artist’ – shortish, rather plump but neat is the general account. Lady Warkworth’s husband is said to have been ‘created Count Percy’: in fact the Earldom (sic) was conferred on this man’s father, though he used it as a courtesy title. Arthur Murphy is transmogrified into ‘Arthur Murray’, whilst Ms Lesley Lewis ...”

“... enables the author to assemble a good collection of anecdotes and bon mots. One Edwardian Co. Cork lady, for instance, was in the habit of sliding down the stairs on a tray, wearing pink tights, and the wife of a Louth baronet had a passion for donkeys. Boredom during a church service could be alleviated by jabbing with a hatpin at the people in front. The ...”

“... 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 ...”