“... of Australian Red and Philadelphia Slim for that of Sickert, Balfour, Conrad, Epstein, Huxley, Lady Cunard and Augustus John. In Later Days he portrays himself as a shy outsider among metropolitan bigwigs, afraid of being exposed as a fraud. Patronised as a peasant innocent, aka the Tramp Poet (a title even the British Museum Reading Room catalogue used ...”

“... that 40,000 dogs were caught and killed in London in 1665 alone, and Fletcher’s The Scornful Lady (c.1609) offers a rare protest against this practice (‘I would ’twere lawfull in the next great sickness to have the dogs spared, those harmless creatures’). But what else were civic authorities, charged with protecting the populace, to do, since they ...”

“... closely connected than to any Plantagenets or Stuarts. ‘Most of their subjects do not know that Lady Diana Spencer (1961-97) was the very first person of primarily English descent who ever came near the British throne in the whole of its 300-year history.’ His view, anyway, is that old ‘Ukania’ is rapidly veering towards history’s landfill. ‘That ...”

“... of fabled enchanter. The coif fell off, and the false plaits. The laboured illusion vanished. The lady who had knelt before the block was in the maturity of grace and loveliness. The executioner, when he raised the head, as usual, to show it to the crowd, exposed the withered features of a grizzled, wrinkled old woman. This account of the execution of Mary ...”

“... Princesses for that matter, rather than figments of sheer fancy. Ceres, he explained, was a fine lady who sailed from Sicily to Greece in 1030 BC, and taught the natives to cultivate corn – ‘for which Benefaction,’ Newton says, ‘she was Deified after death.’ In the following generation we might note the clean-limbed Apollo, whose admirers included ...”

“... Llangorse Lake. Why? To protect himself from Vikings? It was Alfred’s daughter Æthelflæd, ‘Lady of the Mercians’, who eventually conquered Llangorse, but the kingdom of Brecon itself probably fell victim to the kings of neighbouring Gwynedd. English and Welsh rulers used Viking chaos to pick off their competitors. Fleming does full justice to the ...”

“... visit was that Lawrence used some details of the family and the estate for his work in progress, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, causing another of Sitwell’s abrupt reversals of opinion. She decided that Lawrence’s poetry was not as she had thought ‘beautiful’ and ‘moving’ and that he himself looked like ‘a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some ...”

“... to us as Fonda is in 12 Angry Men? Could he have played the chump in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve without angling for sympathy? There has always been a strain of American acting that is resolute, simple and content to trust a known self. You can see it in some of Brando’s contemporaries – Robert Mitchum, William Holden, Glenn Ford or, coming up ...”

“... that sticks in the mind. It also uses the imagery of love. There is a famous passage about a lady who lives in a castle beset by enemies. A powerful king comes to her aid, giving her protection and showering her with gifts. She treats him with contempt. He visits her, he is ‘of alle men feherst to bihalden’ (‘of all men fairest to ...”

“... 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 ...”