“... some of them detailing Thackeray’s illicit passion for Mrs Brookfield. His daughter Annie, now Lady Ritchie, did her best to counter this with a series of ‘biographical introductions’ attached to the Centenary Memorial Edition of her father’s work. The paternal prohibition was breached. In 1931, a particularly venomous attack was launched on ...”

“... Henry Woodd Nevinson is one of my heroes, the sort of person I dream of being. The champion crusader of Edwardian journalism, he filed pro-Revolutionary articles from Russia in 1905, and pro-Nationalist pieces from India. He won an exhausting battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey ...”

“... between individually rational members of the committee of the self. Weak will is when the lady with the blue rinse carries a motion to condemn sin, but the treasurer’s strictures defeat attempts to finance a clean-up campaign. Pears stresses the danger that such functional explanations will be vacuous unless there is a way of explaining why ...”

“... and confiding that he was frightened at the prospect of fame. There is the truly awesome extent of Lady Elgar’s devotion, fervently thanking God whenever Edward wrote beautiful, wonderful, sublime, magnificent music – which in her eyes he invariably did. There is the dreadful deprivation inflicted on their daughter, Carice, constantly and firmly kept both ...”

“... abroad and to persons of quality’. Her dissociation of language looks forward to Mellors, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who talks like a coalminer when he makes love and like an LSE don when discussing coal strikes. All this is to say that Phillipps has written what he obviously intended to write, an introductory essay, designed to stir rather than wrap ...”

“... grandmother when he was ten and she was seven: ‘What does she look like?’ he asks. ‘An old lady, white hair, in her eighties,’ I say. He smiles. ‘Everything changes,’ he says, ‘except the dead.’ Elsewhere a Russian dissident reminds us of Bashevis Singer’s Gimpel the Fool, who cannot find it in himself to disbelieve his wife, though all ...”

“... she did or did not want to do. She wanted to abolish poverty: but she did not want to play the Lady Bountiful distributing charity, nor was she willing to adopt the harsh distinction that the Charity Organisation Society drew between the deserving and the undeserving poor. She was profoundly convinced that poverty and miserable social conditions were the ...”

“... oeuvre (as much a social phenomenon as social history) and the Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (Mrs Dale meets the Archers). Indeed, a glance in any bookshop will reveal row upon row of such rustic and escapist volumes, dwelling with dewy-eyed and treacle-tongued rapture on the idyllic delights of cottages, villages and country ...”

“... movie still of Greta Garbo in The Kiss. The major turning-point is Romney’s ‘Portrait of Lady Hamilton as Circe’. His sexual infatuation with his model is so intense and palpable as to define a tradition that continues unbroken down to the latest Playboy centrefold: the loosened hair, the eyes set in a lustful stare, the half-open rosebud ...”

“... question of Pincher’s timing. He began work in December, having previously been writing, with Lady Falkender, a book called The Infiltrators. Planned originally for April, the launch was brought forward so that it appeared in the Daily Mail for four successive days preceding the launch of the Social Democrats on 26 March. The new party was launched in the ...”

“... distancing. Rape-fantasy is presented as natural (‘Why don’t you rape me?’ Gabriel asks the lady whose hand we have seen him admiring), but, at the same time, the ‘brutes’ in the passage quoted above are the officers of an occupying army. The plot of Caracole is somewhat offhand, but its tempo is affected by the need to present a sequence of ...”

“... ill-written, but also that the sex business is something of an ideological tool: apropos of Lady Chatterley he says: ‘Since there is no other way of making clear his message he does the crude and obvious thing, he performs a miracle for the crowd – he gives us a genital banquet.’ Miller knows even better than Lawrence that every saviour needs his ...”

“... because he hasn’t the command of the language, the understanding of the readers. Sisovsky’s lady friend, once a great Chekhovian actress in Prague, illustrates his point with her own complaint: ‘To be an actress in America you must speak English that does not give people a headache.’ The successful Zuckerman is naturally sorry for these exiles, but ...”

“... view of men and events. Fundamentally he sees life, in terms of his famous definition to Lady Ossory, as a comedy: like Johnson, he disliked a feeler. Throughout, Newcastle is described in terms of farce and buffoonery. The ‘burlesque Duke of Newcastle’ of the letters is fleshed out into a coherent and intelligible character: ‘He loved business ...”

“... to promote terrorism in Latin America. The victim’s daughter is fobbed off by the police: ‘Lady, you know how many Hispanics get wasted in this city every 24 hours?’ The victim’s ‘friend’ says: ‘Very sad. Killed just like that. The crime of our cities. A lottery.’ But Baltasar does not trust this ‘friend’, for he belongs to an eccentric ...”