“... 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 ...”

“... than simply manipulative). It is very disappointing to find that she has so little to say on the Lady Dhuoda, a noblewoman of the ninth century who wrote a book of moral precepts for her son. Dr McKitterick says that the book shows Dhuoda as being ‘well-read and cultured’, but we really ought to be given an idea of the nature of that culture. It is a ...”

“... technique with the governing boards may be guessed by reading a recent newspaper letter from Lady Cottesloe, commending her husband’s skill in dealing with ‘that lovable prima donna, Laurence Olivier’. Olivier has also written a book, Confessions of an Actor, in which he confesses that he was displeased at being succeeded, without consultation, by ...”

“... appointed manager of Hartlepool United. Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman will be much missed. A feisty lady with a good left hook ... shrill of voice and short of temper. I have been keeping her for years. And so on. We still await a British version of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and it is probably too much to hope that those who write our election ...”

“... foot. Another of the new poems, ‘The Earthenware Head’, coolly deflates Plath’s poem ‘The Lady and the Earthenware Head’, criticising her compositional methods as strategies of evasion: You ransacked thesaurus in your poem about it, Veiling its mirror, rhyming yourself into safety… A lot of the poems in Birthday Letters set about an unveiling of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... acquired a tendency to fall in love with every woman that I meet,’ he tells one unperturbed lady. The familiar Storeyan CV is reviewed as the ghosts crowd in. Fenchurch has dialogues with his miner father, who explains: ‘I’ve tried to save you from working on your belly eight hours of the day or night, with two hundred yards of rock above your ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in that area: Rachel Stires was pleasant looking in a skinny, country nutty, windburned lollypop-lady son of way. She had her hair pulled back in a heavy ponytail, and wore velour track suits and plastic flower-shaped earrings of the kind people used to throw darts and shoot down ping-pong balls to win at travelling fairs. I brought bottles of Blue Nun to ...”

“... service that suits their own needs. At these clinics, a nominal fee is charged in order to avoid a Lady Bountiful, charitable image of health care, and to call attention to the joint share of physicians and patients in the fashioning of a community-based system of social medicine. Community or regional health systems have been established in other ...”

“... of one who was, even then, engaged in a bitter law-suit with Jane Austen’s brother. Neither lady, perhaps, saw the other at her most amiable. If Honan were as devout an Anglican as Charles Austen, he might have made more sense of the ‘defensive congratulations’ that attended Charles’s marriage to his deceased wife’s sister. In 1820 such unions ...”

“... journey into the darkness of the past. The details of Salisbury’s character, as given by Lady Gwendolen, match the scenes of Disraeli in his letters. Disraeli was not comfortable with nature, and especially not with horses; nor was Salisbury, who was eventually saved by the tricycle. Disraeli could see everything in a room, but nothing outside ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... available to her ambition is the role of fortune-hunter and knight-errant (she hankers to be ‘Lady Errant’), the mobility that even in romance is reserved for men alone. As she herself concedes when fiercely denying she ‘was seen in man’s apparel ... in designe to do mischief’, she has attempted an impossible crossing of boundaries. McKeon ...”

“... of one artist who still can’t bear to leave: ‘He did well by us, but now he’s like an old lady in the attic. He’s failed but he won’t give up. For us it’s over; the Revolution’s a piece of kitsch.’ Guillermo Cabrera Infante uses the term as well, but for him it’s the ‘kitsch of death’, and his obsession with Cuba’s Castro is a lot ...”