“... wonder, for example, how ‘the social markings of race become crucial’ in The portrait of a Lady), but he does possess intelligence and tact. He clearly admires and takes pleasure in his chosen texts, but nevertheless argues that ‘James’s work, and that of the realists in general, assisted in the creation of a climate of opinion that undermined the ...”

“... by spectacles of patrician corruption (Lord Lovescombe committing adultery in the bamboo, Lady Lovescombe committing adultery in the ornamental pond) and looniness (strange relatives behind every bush). And having herself ‘only half-left childhood’, she intuitively recognises in her hosts ‘the permanent childhood of adults decked out in the ...”

“... dirty mauve’ of February birches, or of ‘a Christmas tree half naked, preparing like the lady of the manor to puff out its bell-shaped skirts’, Pasternak’s Russian never sounds affected, as English inevitably does when pushed into ingenious contingencies of meaning and onomatopoeia. This is because it retains in every complexity the musical ...”

“... rather harsh portraits of suspiciously Oliphant-like writers in Trollope and James. If neither Lady Carbury in The Way We Live Now (1873) nor Mrs Stormer in ‘Greville Fane’ (1892) offers an exact resemblance, the combination of needy widowhood, caddishly indolent sons and relentless word-spinning – Mrs Stormer ‘could invent stories by the yard, but ...”

“... if it were to engage all levels of life:What, you want action?Some attraction? ...Someone singsA lady of almost any ageBut chiefly breast and rings‘Throw your arms around me – Aint you glad you found me.’The contemptuous third-person sketch – ‘chiefly breast and rings’ – is what Eliot will avoid in The Waste Land’s ‘A Game of ...”

“... entirely in terms of theatrical prestige, who’s higher up the ladder. First Vivien, as a leading lady, then Harold, as a star playwright. ‘Life is an endless battle for positions,’ Billington quotes Pinter as saying, and neither of these seems to have doubted this proposition for a-moment. ‘For what Pinter grasps is that life is a series of ...”

“... the music of what doesn’t happen. Suspense is not Maxwell’s game. His idea of a shock is a bag lady finding a copy of Sartor Resartus in a Manhattan trash can. You think: Thomas Carlyle! On East End Avenue! Wild! Passages in All the Days and Nights suggest the earnest exposition of a local historian: ‘The business district of Draperville, Illinois ...”

“... of Evita by society and the military is staged as a series of choruses out of a Latin My Fair Lady, and another essential feature of the Eva myth is put across: if you thought she was awful, you should see the folks who disapproved of her. It all gets a little desultory after that, partly because Jonathan Pryce has decided to play Perón as just a nice ...”

“... about breast-feeding. When David Copperfield is introduced to Mrs Micawber, ‘a thin and faded lady, not at all young’, she is ‘sitting in the parlour ... with a baby at her breast’. ‘This baby was one of twins; and I may remark here that I hardly ever, in all my experience of the family, saw both the twins detached from Mrs Micawber at the same ...”

“... Mrs C. came in with her niece this morning and kissed me on the cheek! She is an elderly lady whom I first saw three months ago, one of the old and vulnerable whom the war has tipped back into illness. From what I could piece together she had had a manic episode ten years ago followed by a bout of depression. On her first visit to me she was not ...”

“... deprivation, Molly Trevelyan’s magnificent tapestry, now displayed over the chimney-piece in Lady Trevelyan’s parlour at Wallington, can stand for the rest. It commemorates the failure of her strenuous attempt between 1903 and 1910 to build up a genuine political partnership with her husband Charles, despite her years of self-education for the ...”

“... that Medievals must have learned either to keep very quiet in bed or else to turn deaf ears: the lady of Montaillou confessed that she was raped in her own bedroom (she seems not to have cried out), and that on another occasion her own majordomo slipped optimistically into bed with her, though there were servants in other beds in the same room. One final ...”

“... testimony. George Bernard Shaw announced that ‘as Edith was an audaciously unconventional lady and Hubert an exceedingly unfaithful husband he does not see how a presentable biography is possible as yet; and he has nothing to contribute to a mere whitewashing operation.’ The Shavian reluctance was overcome, and Doris Langley Moore’s biography did ...”

“... in 1936, where he confused his superiors with extravagant suggestions for adaptations – Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Rabelais. From there his progress was meteoric. When he decided to get married, he fixed on Cleo, a pretty waitress at an all-night restaurant, and courted her every night for about a year; he also hired private detectives to ...”

“... sighs, and the show goes ahead. What he made of the obscenely gross, nude Rhine-daughters or bag-lady Norns is not hard to guess. Before that, in his first Ring, he had endured Yuri Lubimov’s crass Rheingold (Lubimov had been Haitink’s own choice) and, when that was wisely aborted by Isaacs, the claustrophobic vision, inspired by the Washington ...”