“... sisters: the bawd who boasts ‘there is mayhem in my smile’; the lady rescued from a castle who by the fifth day is bored with her prince and making eyes elsewhere; ‘Mad Meg’, from a Brueghel painting, with whom the poet – ‘wild-eyed, unkempt, hellbent, a harridan’ – eagerly identifies. It’s hard not to suspect ...”

“... an adulterer’s use of the text ‘Love thy neighbour’ as he schemes to enter the bed of the lady next door. They ‘gravelled’ T. S. Eliot when he was composing ‘The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism’, yet Eliot was to impose his own philosophy on Dante, affirming the essentiality of Hell’s existence, and that true sinners go there ...”

“... to win citizenship – and she is connected with the mystery of those letters from Booker to his lady-love in Czechoslovakia. Another exile is Magister Maslo, who fears that the Czech secret police have pursued him to Canada, because of his subversive writings. Smiricky had not realised that Maslo was an important writer, but he is informed that Maslo writes ...”

“... visits for Kitson.’ He did not even look up. ‘Look –’ ‘It’s no good being difficult, lady,’ he said. ‘No visits for Kitson and that’s it. If you want to apply again tomorrow, well, that’s your affair. You can come back tomorrow. There’s no visits for Kitson today. Next!’ I was escorted out by a young policeman who was acting as a ...”

“... shops will not serve them or their families. The village is bedrock Labour (‘except for the old lady who lives in the big house up on the hill – she is independent Labour’), and was solid behind Scargill and the strike. It might be seen, then, as bizarre that some of the most serious off-the-picket-line violence of the entire strike should have occurred ...”

“... ill-judged bawdiness, he could be the most zestful and life-enhancing companion. ‘Duff and I,’ Lady Diana Cooper recalls, ‘would give up anything if Ned Lutyens was free for lunch – he was such fun.’ Flippant, irreverent and facetious in his public manner, he was driven all his life to create, to succeed and to greatness. Now a king, now a ...”

“... has another guilty secret (this time plagiarism) but also a rich and comically ogrish woman called Lady Ogram. It sometimes seems he dislikes the idea of Gissing having a bit of fun. Indeed, as I said at the outset, Mr Halperin’s judgments are often mysterious to me. Will Warburton, Gissing’s last novel, is about a young man who loses his money and becomes ...”

“... was ‘under preparation at the time of writing’. The chapter on Yeats is a tissue of fancies (Lady Gregory ‘suggests something of Cosima’); that on Joyce is unintentionally funny (‘Like Mime, the Jesuits have been surrogate parents’), and culminates in the shattering observation that the Wagnerian influence on Joyce is ‘not a question of ...”

“... sitting in it, she said, I would know that I was now fully immersed in the Affair. This lively old lady (she explained that she was the daughter of the officer who had been involved with Dreyfus) then moved from gentle courtesies to a most imposing formality. She realised, she said, that I spoke French, but in order that we might avoid any possible ...”

“... patriot.) With this sentence out guide is in difficulties. We may allow a child and an old lady to give pet-names to two brushes. It is another thing to be told that ‘as he grows older’ he ‘meditates’ on actual historical events. We become sceptical. A novel is not a biography. Dedalus is not Joyce. We ask ourselves at what age did James Joyce ...”

“... at 70 he remarked that ‘being a minor poet is like being minor royalty, and no one, as a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret once explained to me, is happy as that.’ And we see him abashed by the single-mindedness of an Allen Ginsberg, or the mad self-dedication to the idea of poetry he found in Harry Fainlight. Yet this is so far from being a ...”

“... warm personal feeling’), Holiday in Essex (fetching in its reproduction here) and Lotty and the Lady. The other is the war commissions, including ambitious canvasses such as The Nek and The Battle of Romani as well as smaller oils: Motion earlier compares their ‘crafty mingling of accurate observation with metaphorical form’ to the work of Stanley ...”

“... the director and the supporting cast? Agate mentions only one other performer, Judith Anderson as Lady Macbeth, sniffily dismissed with a quotation from ‘an earlier critic on an earlier actress’. His review of Olivier-as-Macbeth concludes with a perfunctory compliment to ‘the production of M. Michel Saint-Denis, Motley’s scenery and the incidental ...”

“... no character at all. I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long.’ But as Lady Blessington would have understood, this piece of romantic modernity is actually a joky compound of two quotations, one from Dryden (on Zimri in Absalom and Achitophel) and the other from Pope writing about women. Shattuck includes in his collection excellent ...”

“... life) fall on – (here the barrel-organ stops playing abruptly). ‘It’s a very fine boy, M’Lady,’ said Mrs Banting ... The interruptions are underpinned by auditory repetition. Within the thoughts of Woolf’s characters, rhyme affords a comforting narcissism and seems often to mark the threshold of the unconscious as it emerges into ...”