“... Camilla Parker-Bowles. (We are not told if this is a sexual relationship, but no doubt the lady gives good-enough Jung and Van der Post to satisfy the seeking Prince.) All this, according to Morton, has made Diana increasingly her own woman. With the help of astrologers and metaphysically-inclined masseurs she is carving a niche for herself in ...”

“... is a reference to his attending a suffragettes’ meeting in 1906: he does not say whether the lady who declared, ‘We have committed the crime of being born woman,’ was aware that the author of Tess was in the audience. In the late letters – Volume Seven prints those of Hardy’s last two years – there are some vivid glimpses of the distant ...”

“... There were occasional moments in Elegies when something went wrong. The line ‘How well my lady used her knife and fork!’ was awkward because too Literary. And Dunn in Northlight celebrating his ‘Moonpuddled water, mystic Firth’ again treads dangerously close to Higher Things. I admire this book for its scope, which reaches to Australia and ...”

“... he was writing Peter Grimes. In 1936, after hearing a concert performance of Shostakovich’s The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, he wrote in his diary that he would ‘defend it through thick & thin against these charges of “lack of style” ... It is the composer’s heritage to take what he wants from where he wants – & to write music ... The “eminent ...”

“... the nationalist tiger by expropriating Anglo-Iranian. (Its remaining employees, the vicar and the lady who ran the guest-house in Abadan – three days before, she’d attacked an Iranian officer with an umbrella – gathered in front of the Gymkhana Club on 4 October for HMS Mauritius to take them to Basra. The ship’s band sailed away playing ‘Colonel ...”

“... where he stayed with a comfy German family, conceiving a considerable admiration for the lady of the house (‘too fine for her surroundings’), though not for the gentleman, and then to Jena, ostensibly to follow philosophy lectures at the university, but devoting more attention to the poets, including Rilke and Hölderlin: ‘Their language is ...”

“... behind the last row of chairs. Now, at least I was visible. At a desk on a platform sat a young lady with a telephone permanently at her ear. From the main saleroom below was transmitted the conduct of the auction. Evidently, the auctioneer announced the lots and took bids from below; the telephonist took the bids from above – and the bids were ...”

“... is in sharp contrast to Mr Anderson’s account, in which he says more than once that if only the lady had chosen Tristan Garel Jones (did I hear someone say ‘Who?’) as her Chief Whip last year instead of Tim Renton, and had had someone a bit less laid-back than Peter Morrison (‘who?’ again) as her Parliamentary Private Secretary, then she would still ...”

“... Eliot, the only females to get into the book are queens. In addition to Isabella we have Our Lady of Loretto. Then there’s physics, who takes over from theology as the queen of the sciences. (Unfair! He also mentions Carson and there’s an unexplained allusion to Anna Bramwell, who is a lively historian of ecology.) Given the very high quality of much ...”

“... with their commissioning of Holroyd as biographer) with ‘rampant commercialism’. My Fair Lady, like Cats for Eliot, has multiplied Shaw’s posthumous worth in ways that it is hard to imagine the author condoning during his lifetime. Shaw’s trustees have marketed the flame very profitably. Holroyd tells the story of the Shavian bequests with ...”

“... is to tell about a smoker’s life. I was probably five years old when my grandmother’s cleaning lady taught me to draw on a cigarette like a teat, not blow into it like a whistle. Du Maurier was the brand in question. Like Zeno, in Svevo’s book, and most children no doubt, I pinched cigarettes from adults – mainly my grandfather, who smoked ...”

“... was much in fashion at that time. It provided the most passionate coupling enjoyed by Mellors and Lady Chatterley, and their story was being written at the very moment these discussions were going on. Breton’s revulsion at the thought of sexual congress between males was certainly no simple gut reaction, whatever unconscious motives he may or may not have ...”

“... Massachusetts Avenue that I used to frequent, as much because I was intrigued by the little old lady with a green parakeet on her shoulder who owned the place (she was reputed to be Whitehead’s daughter or niece), as because I was always in the market for a set of Conrad, Parkman or Scott. One day I went into the tiny shop just as she was saying to a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”