“... 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 ...”

“... and his wife à quatre. Then suddenly in the July heat of 1978 he was handed a letter from the Lady that severed relationships. She claimed to have learned of what he was writing and considered that she was being seriously misrepresented. He protested, but her house was shut against him. Moraes was doubtless more indiscreet than he knew, for he seems to ...”

“... A Nation Mourns,’ Eye-addicts quote nostalgically to one another, and ‘It’s Lady Slagheap!’); it runs excellent fantasy-parodies (One for the Road, the third collection of Dear Bill letters, is a gleeful addition to the canon); and it has employed some of the best cartoonists around. Marnham is disappointingly uninformative on the ...”

“... Kinnock would crack under the pressure of a long campaign. As things turned out, it was the Iron Lady herself who showed repeated signs of metal fatigue. From her initial promise to go ‘on and on’, to the bizarre press conference where she paraded her whole Cabinet jammed together side by side – in Hugo Young’s savage phrase, a row of ‘tight-assed ...”

“... of men looking more closely at pregnant bodies – at any rate if they had upper-class owners. The lady soon died of what turned out to be a tumour. Midwives would not have been so shy. Another harrowing story concerns a 19th-century American doctor, James Marion Sims, who was dubbed the ‘Architect of the Vagina’. Because only the poorest women gave birth ...”

“... one of those sealed capsules by which future generations are supposed to know us. ‘Red China. Lady Docker. The Goon Show ... A-bomb.’ The story, hobbled by these overloud hints, ‘lurches back to the present’. That’s where it is told, that’s where the pain has to be understood. A splinter from the past is always flying towards an unsuspecting ...”

“... King Cole’, the Browning parody is perhaps the funniest: Who smoke-snorts toasts o’ My Lady Nicotine, Kicks stuffing out of Pussyfoot, bids his trio Stick up their Stradivarii (that’s the plural). But the Swinburne is the most loving – it is, indeed, beautiful:    In the time of old sin without sadness And golden with wastage of gold ...”

“... his dealings with his Pythia. On formal occasions, sometimes with irony, he addresses her as Young Lady; more privately he uses her original name, Arieka. These distinctions are important; Ionides is her savvy instructor but also, when she is in formal or prophetic mode, her servant. What is about to happen is a confrontation, not at all unusual in this ...”

“... school (Westminster), and he grew up thinking that he might work locally too, just like his dad. Lady Stansgate gives another insight on the boys’ upbringing: ‘They used to pretend they were workmen called Bill and Jim – Michael was Bill, Anthony Jim. Nurse Olive made them working clothes and they used to come and ask for jobs and I used to give them ...”

“... of the Chandler-scripted Blue Dahlia and two more Marlowe films – Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake, and the Hawks/Faulkner/Bogart/Bacall Big Sleep – Chandler was rich and famous. Under the pressure of Hollywood social life and the Wilder collaboration (which Hiney calls Chandler’s first close human contact with anyone other than Cissy in a ...”

“... been allowed to put sterling into the system in October 1990 was a clear sign that the old lady was losing her political grip. It was an issue, therefore, on which Major had staked not only his economic judgment, but much emotional and political capital. Perhaps this explains why, though far from alone in endorsing ERM membership, he identified himself ...”

“... outside the American Embassy in London, thus disproving (as a pamphlet of the time pointed out) Lady Bracknell’s piercing words in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in ...”