“... 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 ...”

“... terms. Instead he found errors of detail: he complained to Holman Hunt that ‘I didn’t say the Lady of Shalott’s hair was blown about like that,’ and had him remove unauthorial steps from his illustration to ‘King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid’. He was dealing with Pre-Raphaelites, whose notions of fidelity to text were flexible, but Altick ...”

“... was lucky to be spared the knowledge that the most widely-read novel of 1960 was the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover by that strange bird D.H. Lawrence. Almost imperceptibly, the youngish writer whose work had stirred the social conscience of the middle class had become an old fogey. The stream of publications continued, but after the Great War ...”

“... Forster’s work than he did of Galsworthy’s. The only Lawrence he is recorded to have read is Lady Chatterley, from which, like the unlearned readers who had heard that his Manilius contained a scurrilous preface, he doubtless hoped to extract a low enjoyment. Mr Graves is artlessly surprised at his having read Heine in the original, not realising that ...”

“... of them). The real feeling of Brooks, I submit, is: Thank God we don’t have to watch a lady actually giving herself to a stinking hairy worker. ‘Even a controlled suggestion of carnal bestiality is surely impossible,’ he remarks.These cloudy but provocative phrases conceal a struggle which had better have been brought into the open. The ...”

“... more than a little sympathy with the citizens who are not interested in being chatted to by the lady from the BBC. She is looking for things to respond to, and when there is a shortage of them carries you forward with an account of her time in the theatre, or of a conversation about nappy rash with one of the men from the BBC. James Campbell drinks too much ...”

“... Molina called for someone to come forward and make a few remarks. As a rule, some ‘little old lady’ (viejita) would approach the microphone and make a short speech. (The Monsignor had his viejitas too, whom we had seen leaving his Mass that same day, chattering away about the Sandinistas as if they were a rival neighbourhood clan.) The viejitas of ...”

“... great case, had no outstanding interrogation to his credit, and was conspicuously worsted by Lady Sackville in the contest over the will of Sir John Murray Scott. And, when his political prospects conflicted with his professional obligations, as in the Lever libel case, he put political prospects first. As a politician, his searing assaults on the ...”

“... to his daughter Mary) and possessed to his dying day the skin and cherubic shape of a Rubens lady – as did Mao Tse-tung. General Richardson’s concern with homosexuality stems from a passionate desire to lessen the guilt and unhappiness which have traditionally accompanied the sublimation of homosexual instincts. This aspect of his book strikes me as ...”