“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... This one contains neither. Incidentally, among other vast lacunae, it makes no mention at all of Lady Falkender (Joe Haines gets a single passing reference and his name misspelled in the index), of the mysterious allegations about the role of the South Africans in the Thorpe affair, or of the astonishing – disgraceful and unforgivable – resignation ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”