“... 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 ...”

“... think Aides should be forbidden to write books about their Generals.’ Even Eisenhower’s lady driver stuck her pen into Monty. The major onslaughts came in the memoirs of the American generals themselves, provoking more-in-sorrow letters of protest from the field-marshal. In Britain, however, the legend of his leadership remained inviolate. It was a ...”

“... more momentous than suppressed desire, a suppressed memory of suppressed desire, for the young lady, glimpsed fleetingly from the rear as she left the premises ...’ His slippery ellipsis. For all the pipe-smoking persona, this is Harris twee. William Empson is praised for magnanimous agility on one page, and then on the very next page, à propos of ...”

“... offering new ways of handling awkward or challenging social situations. By the early 18th century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu could write of the Duchess of Marlborough: ‘We continue to see one another, like two people that are resolved to hate with civility.’ Civil behaviour involved a mastery of both deference and superiority, the ability to please people ...”

“... just professional courtesy (or pious conformism). Why should it be ‘insightful’ to focus on Lady Catherine de Bourgh in order to ‘discover’ that Austen represents ‘a series of extremely powerful women each of whom acts out the rebellious anger so successfully repressed by the heroine and the author’, the latter of whom ‘quietly and forcefully ...”

“... nice melody, I like that.’ It happened when I was going to fetch you at the station, some young lady said: ‘Yes, I like to hear that.’ I’m sure that my musical quality is much greater than that of the girl who divorced me. I used to sing also in a choir, so I can have a good voice. My speaking voice is rather flat, but my singing voice is ...”

“... the existing regime. Duff Cooper, Liddell says, was ‘feeling rather bad’ because his wife, Lady Diana, was facing prosecution for accepting a free sack of stale bread for her pigs. More enlightening was the remark made to him by Churchill in May 1940 when France fell, and passed on to Liddell: ‘The end,’ Churchill is supposed to have said, ‘is ...”

“... Hannah’s first-person narrative on Esther Summerson, models the slave-owner Mrs Cosgrove on Lady Dedlock and takes the slave tracker Mr Trappe from Mr Tulkinghorn. As Robbins argues, passages are not copied or plagiarised; Crafts’s borrowings are highly skilled, and very aware of the differences between Bleak House and her own story. It is odd in the ...”

“... the unblemished genealogy of that personification. In Belfast, the same is true, save that the lady is now operating under the trade name of ‘Ulster’, and is equally indifferent to the claims to visibility of half a million Ulster Catholics. In some hell-mouth well stocked with munitions of war, draft begging letters, and receipts from the ...”

“... 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 ...”