“... conceits, including the notion that only when heaven and earth are conflated will he and his lady be able to join in love: Unless the giddy heaven fall, And earth some new convulsion tear; And, us to join, the world should all Be cramp’d into a planisphere. ‘Cramp’d into a planisphere’ is as good a way of describing the universe of love in ...”

“... New Statesman). Holtby was a mainstay of the magazine and enjoyed plotting editorial strategy with Lady Rhondda and holidaying with her in the South of France; yet in Testament of Friendship, journalism is continually portrayed as a distraction from the nobler art of novel-writing, with Brittain remarking that some of those weeping so copiously at Winifred’s ...”

“... Moral Lesson to Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale, Now Mrs Hester Lynch Piozzi presented in the figure of Lady Fantasma Tunskull the vanity, hypocrisy, false sentiment, selfishness and cruelty towards children with which the former Mrs Thrale was now associated. She blamed Baretti for that as well. Hints in Johnson’s and Mrs Thrale’s journals of a shared interest ...”

“... But we decided to interrogate the mortician instead. Who was in the coffin? ‘A white-haired old lady.’ But what was she wearing? ‘A pants suit.’ But what kind of pants suit? ‘Purple lurex.’ It was enough. There may have been many white-haired old ladies in pants suits being laid to rest in Miami that morning, but only my mother was in purple ...”

“... There’s only one naked lady left, going to ruin out there in the fog amid the dahlias and lavender, its pink trumpet flowers wilted and in tatters. There used to be a couple of dozen of them blooming in the yard every August. Not much else was out there in the yard doing much of anything so the ladies made quite a spectacle of themselves, like Rockettes in a dusty frontier town ...”

“... Chelsea Flower Show, the Mail on Sunday ran an interview under the headline: ‘Parents Reveal how Lady Black’s Greed Drove Her’. Her mother and stepfather are nevertheless excused as media ‘innocents’ and are among the small number of the forgiven. Amiel’s book also does a disservice to her as a journalist whose ‘political stuff’ on abortion ...”

“... to as ‘X’ – once adorned him with lace and jewels and took him to Carnevale dressed as ‘a lady of the rococo period. He looked as if he had walked out of a Watteau … and only later was he shocked into regretting his perfection and his innocence.’ These fantasies of the jewelled tomboy projected onto Nijinsky by rich aristocrats continued long ...”

“... in the local newspaper that unto him had been born ‘on Friday, at Mile End Terrace, the Lady of John Dickens, Esq, a son’ ... As an adult, Charles Dickens considered Friday his lucky day. Less tentative than Ackroyd, Kaplan entitles his chapter ‘The Hero of my own Life’. I don’t for a moment think that Ackroyd is copying Kaplan. But they ...”

“... and wonder how it survived his transcription of Samuel Johnson’s reply to Miss Seward: ‘The lady confounds annihilation, which is nothing, with the apprehension of it, which is dreadful. It is in the apprehension of it that the horror of annihilation consists.’ Or Swift’s ‘Thoughts on Various Subjects’: ‘Every Man desires to live long; but no ...”

“... the unforeseeable turn of events which led him to appear as a star witness for the defence in the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, where he memorably trumped all the po-faced moralism appealed to by the prosecuting counsel by describing Lawrence’s treatment of sex as ‘highly virtuous, even puritanical’. The other was his membership of the Pilkington ...”

“... its product.’ More tellingly still, evoking her childhood fear of sharing the fate of the crazy lady next door, who died with her clothes off and her furniture all upside down, she writes: ‘On emotional tiptoe, daring as I could, dodging as I had to, I approached a first vagrant notion of rape; also, more soundly, an intuition of the fiercer ...”

“... instant Azhar turned his head, Big Billy called, ‘Hey! Why ain’t you lookin’ at us, little lady?’ She twisted round and waved at the conductor standing on his platform at the far end of the bus. But a passenger got on and the conductor followed him upstairs. The few other passengers, sitting like statues, were unaware or unconcerned. Mother turned ...”

“... but he also possesses a remarkable capacity for shooting himself in the foot. And in marrying Lady Diana Spencer, he thought he had chosen the ideal bride, yet it turned out that he had made the most terrible mistake of his life. The most important thing that a Prince of Wales has to do is to choose the right wife. Neither George IV nor Edward VIII ...”

“... character. There is a marvellous mixing of respectability and libido. She is the perfect suburban lady honeycombed with dark subterranean desires. She loves to remember the sparkling, bourgeois social life and travel opportunities afforded to the wife of a tycoon (‘people tell me that my dining room was rather like one of those celebrated Parisian ...”

“... but ... it is impossible every thing clever and agreeable can be so common as this word So wrote Lady Bradshaigh to Samuel Richardson in 1749. She is not the only person to have been puzzled by the phenomenon of the sentimental, both word and thing; nor by the equally proliferating possibilities and applications of the word ‘sensibility’. A great many ...”