“... share her employer’s straitlaced views. In later years she fondly recalled flirting with Lord Kitchener while accompanying Jane to a garden party at Windsor. On another occasion she found a necklace hidden under her plate by a secret admirer. She grew close to several male visitors to the Stanford household, and at one point almost certainly became ...”

“... to be writing fiction, rather than visiting Joan Crawford in her film-set caravan, accompanied by Lord Snowdon. Richard Wollheim and Colin McInnes had been overheard talking about him on the balcony at a party. ‘There we were,’ said McInnes afterwards, ‘like two Chinese civil servants in the snow, talking about the Emperor.’ He shared an office with ...”

“... typical female role model of the conformist period was June Allyson, pouting loyally at home while James Stewart, camped out in the Mojave Desert, manfully concerned himself with the creation of the Strategic Air Command – a theme that took advantage of the B-36’s capacity to fill the Cinemascope screen. The letterbox format was less suited to June ...”

“... little of Mozart, saying he tinkled. Of his literary dislikes, the most striking is for Henry James, whom he misses few chances to disparage. His treatment of The Ambassadors in Aspects of the Novel is an obvious instance, but there are others, sometimes describable as sly digs, sometimes as pure dislike. He professed to believe that ...”

“... was all set, in its competent and agreeable fashion, to carry on as before. According to Henry James, in 1899, the novel had become a universally valid form, ‘the book par excellence’; according to Ford Madox Ford, in 1930, it was still indispensable, ‘the only source to which you can turn to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire ...”

“... depending on ‘both the quality or otherwise of the audience and Lola’s mood each night’, as James Morton writes in his entertaining biography. And sometimes ‘it depended on what money was thrown on stage.’ More or fewer parts of Lola’s body might be exposed during the dance, which was in two parts. In the first, she played the spider, spinning its ...”

“... or Missouri, or Victoria, once homes to the mythical Robin Hood and the real Jesse James and Ned Kelly, no longer are. Still, if we move out from Hobsbawm’s focus on the social bandit as actual individual, and consider the entire Robin Hood myth, the ideal remains familiar in our outlaw-free world. The myth requires a great mass of heavily ...”

“... itself on this arrangement, which it sees as having the merit of flexibility). But, as the late Lord Bingham said, the absence of codification means that, ‘constitutionally speaking, we now find ourselves in a trackless desert without map or compass.’ Determining what our constitution requires, what fundamental rules it sets out, is as difficult and ...”

“... the most important members of the reigning Whig Junto – the Duke of Shrewsbury, Sir John Somers, Lord-Keeper of the Great Seal and soon to be Lord High Chancellor, Lord Romney, Sir Edward Russell the First Lord of the Admiralty, and some others – to ...”

“... William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, recorded his last ever broadcast from the temporary offices of the German Radio Corporation, in Hamburg, on the day Hitler shot himself. British troops were on the point of entering the city and Joyce and his colleagues had raided the cellars of the Funkhaus, drinking everything they could find ...”

“... Edwards spotted an announcement in the New Times that the cabinet were meeting for a dinner at Lord Harrowby’s house in Grosvenor Square the following night. What a golden opportunity to decapitate the lot of them! Edwards had of course inserted the announcement himself: the cabinet dined elsewhere, though Harrowby’s staff were kept busy cooking and ...”

“... performance in France and Belgium in the First World War has received mixed reviews. General Sir James Edmonds, editor of the official history of the war, declared Allenby’s record on the Western Front ‘one of gross stupidity from first to last’. On the other hand, Colonel Repington, the influential military correspondent of the Times, pronounced him ...”

“... which was published in 1937 as Letters from Iceland. It contained not only Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, but also a number of other putative letters (to Richard Crossman and William Coldstream, for instance), MacNeice’s ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, the famously camp prose-piece ‘Hetty to Nancy’, and the joint-authored ‘Last Will and ...”

“... Picture and the Men – An Historical Study (1900), which remains an indispensable resource.Henry James was among the many who followed these developments with interest. He had long been an admirer of Holbein’s portraits. Reviewing an exhibition of John Singleton Copley’s portraits in the Nation in 1875, he had noted that Copley was ‘by no means a ...”

“... modest critical success and further novels followed: Barham Downs (1784), The Fair Syrian (1787), James Wallace (1788), Man as He Is (1792) and finally Hermsprong. Bage told Godwin that he believed ‘he should not have written novels, but for want of books to assist him in any other literary undertaking.’ Not that the reluctant novelist was uneducated. In ...”