“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”