“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... swung open the huge heavy doors of the treasury, where gifts to Nuestra Señora del Pilar, Our Lady of the Pillar, were kept. A blaze of diamonds burst from the dark cupboard: emeralds, rubies, gold, crystal, every precious gem and mineral cut and polished and set into adornments for her statue. The kings of Spain, and then General Franco, were leading ...”

“... in … as background to her work’, ostensibly because it was ‘what that very private lady would have wished’, but perhaps also because it was relatively uneventful. Jennifer Kloester’s new book has no such scruples: granted ‘carte blanche’ by Heyer’s only son, she has been through a vast quantity of ‘new and untapped’ letters and ...”

“... cards shuffled and dealt from some unnumberable deck: ‘Bronzebeard’, ‘the king’, ‘the lady’, ‘the French brothers’, ‘the blond one’, ‘the forked nose’. What’s more, Nostradamus seems to take perverse delight in demonstrating repeatedly the relative futility of prediction: ‘Death, then pillage: good advice, coming late’: When ...”

“... this effusion, surpassing even Mervyn Griffith-Jones’s remarks in leading the prosecution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover 80 years later, it was not surprising that Jessel ordered custody of Mabel to be given to Besant. Annie then launched an appeal for a judicial separation, which Jessel refused. This judgment effectively barred her in perpetuity from ...”

“... His star continued to rise in the 1930s, and the Maly Theatre’s premiere of his second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, was the event of the 1934 Moscow season; Stalin, Molotov and other leaders came to a later performance to see what all the fuss was about. Unfortunately, they didn’t like what they heard and saw – not tuneful enough, too ...”

“... of 37 Ridley Avenue (this on page 37); an abortion Leah had; the spooky monologue of a statue, Our Lady of Willesden, ‘the Black Madonna’; and a scene at a pharmacy, when Leah is given the wrong packet of photographs, one with pictures of Shar. Hard to tell the significance of that 37: a prime number; the normal human body temperature in Celsius; the ...”

“... the original sister, the story’s ostensible victim until she later resurfaces as a cheerful old lady. The narrator admits that she and her mother, the one who actually knew the characters, would have written the story differently, according to their respective notions of sex, each determined by the progressive ideas of their times. As a nod to ...”

“... Nasreen, who bears ‘no more resemblance to Diana or Ceres or Proserpina (or for that matter Lady Lazarus or Emily Dickinson or the Three Witches) than I myself do to Actaeon or Sir Gawain or Joseph Shapiro.’ Most stalkers, according to Reid Meloy, suffer from what he calls a ‘narcissistic linking fantasy’: intense admiration becomes an imaginary ...”

“... spelling of ‘Vodou’ deliberately.) Under Duvalier, Fred Voodoo told reporters about the first lady’s refrigerated closet for furs. After the quake, he told them that rain leaked into his tent at night and forced everyone to their feet, holding their babies till the storm passed. Once written up, Fred Voodoo’s trials are forgotten. He is a disposable ...”