“... two-seater aeroplane and reclaimed their respective wives. (‘Quite like a sensational novel,’ Lady Sackville noted in her diary.) The relationship didn’t really end until some time in 1922. Wild oats are all very well, Vita wrote to Harold, but not ‘when they grow as high as a jungle’. Nigel Nicolson was three the year his mother eloped. Vita ...”

“... has ruthlessly dumped in a disagreeable Home for aged persons; she contrives that the smelly old lady shall go on a visit to her daughter and then be refused readmittance to the Home on the score of an incontinence which Ruth has cleverly faked. Bobbo is an accountant. Ruth manages to insinuate herself covertly into his office and cook and confuse his books ...”

“... for in return. Leading examples of Scott’s oiling of royalty are his James V of Scotland in The Lady of the Lake (1809), Queen Caroline, consort of George II, as a healing principle of Mercy in The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and Queen Elizabeth I, epitome of successful English monarchs, in Kenilworth (1821). Sutherland is especially dismissive of ...”

“... Spanish – by no means the same as 1880s Madrid Spanish – to be second nature to her. The old lady completed new translations of both Noli Me Tangere and its even more savage 1891 sequel El Filibusterismo just before she died. In most respects, it is a huge advance over previous translations, handsomely laid out and with enough footnotes to be helpful ...”

“... A great Irish lady, her disgraced nephew and a young priest with strong Republican sympathies are driving through Dublin on St Patrick’s Day, 1916. ‘They were speaking of patriots, Dublin associations of famous rebels, ancient and modern.’ Merrion Square evokes the memory of a distinguished Irishman whom the English put on trial ...”

“... Pamela punctuates with hasty dashes when she recalls affecting scenes (her attendance at her lady’s deathbed; her new master’s ominously smiling approach to her, alone in her late mistress’s dressing-room, as she is finishing this very letter). Richardson eventually did away with these dashes. The original Pamela turns readily to colloquialism: she ...”

“... in doing this. I did not know a word of Hottentot, and could never therefore have explained to the lady what the object of my footrule could be; and I really dared not ask my worthy missionary host to interpret for me. I therefore felt in a dilemma as I gazed at her form, that gift of bounteous nature to this favoured race, which no mantua-maker, with all her ...”

“... refused to speak, then went along with the identification, then changed her mind after a former lady-in-waiting to the tsarina visited the asylum and said that Anna was too short to be Tatiana. But her supporters refused to give up on the idea of her being one of the grand duchesses. Because she wouldn’t speak, they gave her a list of the ...”

“... like Sarah Orne Jewett and Kate Chopin. Both in such romantic and allegorical tales as ‘The Lady of Little Fishing’ (1874) and ‘Castle Nowhere’ (1875) and in the more realistic or satirical ones like ‘Miss Elisabetha’ (1875), Woolson is an extraordinarily evocative landscape artist as well as a subtly ironic stylist; if the early stories make ...”

“... not a scheming and bloodthirsty war goddess. Other goddesses appear in cameo – Calypso, the seal-lady Sirens, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis – but there is no sign that we are supposed to realise they are goddesses. Poseidon, Hermes and Helius do not appear in person, although there are some scary storms and shipwrecks. One of my favourite moments was when ...”

“... Centre looking.’ In BedThe sign on the wall of the flat where Ina works reads ‘Beautiful Young Lady’. ‘That’s it,’ Ina says. ‘It doesn’t say nothing more. It doesn’t say name, it doesn’t say colour, it doesn’t say nothing. And who wants to come up, comes up.’ Then Ina waits. ‘It’s a gamble. You flip the coin. The same as working in ...”

“... Let’s just say I’m a neo-surrealist – a bit dark, a bit Goth, a bit grunge – a sort of lady Hans Bellmer. As a child I was enchanted by the Surrealists’ Exquisite Cadavers game – the one in which you make comic figures out of mismatched body parts. This love of the grotesque has never gone away: even today, I enjoy putting dog or cat heads on ...”

“... to bed Abram’s wife Sara, ‘R. Berekiah said: Because he dared to approach the shoe of that lady.’ One way or another, as Hezser says, the ‘later rabbis were well aware of the symbolism of the foot and shoe’. Shoes, make of them what you will. With or without a Freudian tinge, shoes relate to the sacred and profane. God’s first instruction to ...”

“... to complain about all her dogs. The Globe ran a headline in 1991, claiming she ‘Lives Like a Bag Lady!’ and had to issue a retraction after she sued. She has been spotted holding up the queue in the drugstore while picking through her piles of coupons, but that could be anybody’s grandma. It’s hardly Norma Desmond – how much easier it would be to ...”

“... which has fallen into the hands of Gray via its current owner, an American academic called Lady Sara Sim-Jaegar (an anagram of his own full name). The manuscript consists of three historical narratives and a series of diaries written by a retired Glaswegian schoolmaster, John Tunnock, a reasonably transparent alter ego for the author. The diaries ...”