“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... might talk to his good Lord Such and Such, who might get you a moment with the even more elevated Lady Herself, who might if you were lucky be a gentlewoman of the queen’s bedchamber, and who might see about your petition for the reversion of an office or talk to the master of the wards about that tasty estate down the road you had your eye on. Ralegh was ...”

“... Thereafter, Castlereagh spent a year at Cambridge. Like his father, he married an Anglican, Lady Amelia Hobart, the daughter of the Earl of Buckinghamshire, and worshipped in the Anglican Church. Despite this, Bew shows, he was influenced by the Presbyterian Enlightenment of 18th-century Scotland and its Ulster outposts. The young politician was happily ...”

“... it was easy enough for Manning to take in a CD with a scrawled inscription in felt tip – ‘Lady Gaga’ did the trick – wipe the contents and ‘then write a compressed split file … nobody suspected a thing.’ A former FOB Hammer security staffer explained how easy it could be: ‘There were laptops sitting there with passwords on sticky notes. If ...”

“... the mines, including those from which the Loshes’ wealth in part derived, were dug. Disraeli’s Lady Constance in Tancred was perhaps more typical than the intellectually gifted Losh in forming the general impression that ‘first there was nothing, then there was something; then, I forget the next, I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came ...”