“... 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 ...”

“... an adulterer’s use of the text ‘Love thy neighbour’ as he schemes to enter the bed of the lady next door. They ‘gravelled’ T. S. Eliot when he was composing ‘The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism’, yet Eliot was to impose his own philosophy on Dante, affirming the essentiality of Hell’s existence, and that true sinners go there ...”

“... outside the American Embassy in London, thus disproving (as a pamphlet of the time pointed out) Lady Bracknell’s piercing words in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in ...”

“... been allowed to put sterling into the system in October 1990 was a clear sign that the old lady was losing her political grip. It was an issue, therefore, on which Major had staked not only his economic judgment, but much emotional and political capital. Perhaps this explains why, though far from alone in endorsing ERM membership, he identified himself ...”

“... rather harsh portraits of suspiciously Oliphant-like writers in Trollope and James. If neither Lady Carbury in The Way We Live Now (1873) nor Mrs Stormer in ‘Greville Fane’ (1892) offers an exact resemblance, the combination of needy widowhood, caddishly indolent sons and relentless word-spinning – Mrs Stormer ‘could invent stories by the yard, but ...”

“... deprivation, Molly Trevelyan’s magnificent tapestry, now displayed over the chimney-piece in Lady Trevelyan’s parlour at Wallington, can stand for the rest. It commemorates the failure of her strenuous attempt between 1903 and 1910 to build up a genuine political partnership with her husband Charles, despite her years of self-education for the ...”

“... Kinnock would crack under the pressure of a long campaign. As things turned out, it was the Iron Lady herself who showed repeated signs of metal fatigue. From her initial promise to go ‘on and on’, to the bizarre press conference where she paraded her whole Cabinet jammed together side by side – in Hugo Young’s savage phrase, a row of ‘tight-assed ...”