“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an Irishwoman for whom the house and its lands were nonetheless a ‘sacred trust’. The same lady strongly believed that the English deserved to lose the war, for theirs was not a Christian cause. So who were the real patriots? And for what?Such snapshots of discordant individuals are refreshing because more academic studies of patriotism and nationalism ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... every paper burnt, and every letter unanswered’. Allusions to James – primarily Portrait of a Lady – and other classic novelists structure the text, and Malcolm, an inveterate mythologiser, also compares Plath to Medea and Medusa; Hughes to Adonis and Prometheus; and Olwyn to Cerberus and the Sphinx. Fairy tales get in there too, especially ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... autobiography; in 1967, after Max received a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours, she became Lady Mallowan; in 1973 her last detective story, Postern of Fate, appeared. A slow physical and mental decline set in. In the winter of 1975 she caught a chill, and died the following January at Wallingford. A year after her death Max married Barbara Parker, who ...”

“... 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 ...”