“... have known: after all, Ethelred married Alfred’s daughter Ethelflæd, who would become ‘the Lady of the Mercians’ and co-operate closely with her brother Edward in the reconquest of the north. But even before that, alderman Ethelred was hand in glove with Alfred. The silence about him is deeply suspicious. Alex Woolf, of St Andrews, has made the ...”

“... a deacon, banging away on a drum set his mother bought him with money she had earned as an Avon lady in town. Otis Redding performing in 1967 Otis was the fourth of six children. The youngest was born in 1955. The projects, which had been new when the Reddings moved in, were already crumbling, and so the family moved, out of the Tindall Heights Homes ...”

“... be ruffled’. Diaries and magazine columns, especially E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady, bear witness to the authority of this tremendous personage. ‘Last night I would have put my head in the gas oven,’ Ann Fleming wrote, ‘if I wasn’t too frightened of the cook to go into the kitchen.’Landemare​ was the crème de la crème. She ...”

“... seem that the latter is implicit in the former. Who bothers, while teaching The Portrait of a Lady for the nth time, to explain to a class that it is a beautiful book? But it would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that, for most writers, greedy to learn and emulate, this is the only important question. Randall Stevenson’s volume in the Oxford English ...”

“... Than man can bear.’ To which the unsentimental Nubian replies: ‘None can exceed their limit, lady./You either bear or break.’ In the extraordinary poem ‘God Made Blind’, Rosenberg presents a stratagem of ‘God-gulling’: this is a way of cheating God by pretending that we have as much misery as we can bear (so God will lay off before it really is ...”

“... loves watching her, and, just for fun, calls her ‘Colonel Barker’; perhaps she was ‘a lady pilot, a sergeant in the WAAF, something like that: one of those women, in other words, who’d charged about so happily during the war, and then got left over.’ As it happens, Kay spent the war working for the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service, pulling ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was comparable to that of Shakespeare and Spinoza (though probably more as foil than as model). Lady Anne Monson, the British botanist of Indian plants, toasted Linnaeus as ‘king of all the realms of nature’ before raising her glass to George III, who was king merely of Britain and Ireland.Until his eyesight failed him in old age, he prided himself on ...”

“... respect’ owed by the courts to the executive and legislature was another favourite formula. Lady Hale wrote in 2008 that ‘the doctrine of the “margin of appreciation” as applied in Strasbourg has no application in domestic law.’ One of her colleagues, Lord Mance, saw it as merely a ‘principle which distributes responsibility between the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”