“... in some of his as yet unpublished poems, in ‘Preludes’, for example, or ‘Portrait of a Lady’, ‘First Caprice in North Cambridge’, and ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. He had decided he must stay in London, there to launch his career as a poet. This was the course recommended by his new friend and admirer Ezra Pound, to whom he had ...”

“... crowded aircraft cabin, his hand raised and his face as sombre as it is possible to imagine, with Lady Bird on one side and Jackie, still in her blood-stained coat, on the other, the tiny figure in front holding the Bible is Sarah Hughes. Johnson choreographed every aspect of the picture. It sent out all the signals he wanted to ...”

“... responded by sending in an astonishing £25,000.’ There were messages of endorsement from Lady Antonia Fraser and the feisty historian Andrew Roberts; the Economist saluted the new edition as ‘impeccably postmodern’; 5000 free copies were distributed to schools, a Trojan horse for early indoctrination in traditional values that would be reinforced ...”

“... in my first play, Forty Years On. It was a parody of Oscar Wilde. I was in drag as a putative Lady Bracknell and wheeled by John Gielgud. ‘I can walk,’ I said, ‘only I’m so rich I don’t need to.’20 July. Another hot day, too hot to be out of doors, until lying on the sofa trying to work in the late afternoon, I hear the rustle of rain. In one ...”

“... visits Moscow, and sees Tatiana at a ball. No longer the bucolic ingénue, she is now a society lady, married to a general. ‘How well she’d studied her new role!’ He, quite unexpectedly, falls in love with her, only to be rejected. She admits to a strong residual passion for him, and tells him that she would happily give up this ‘tinsel ...”

“... told one of the Abuelas that they reminded her of Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities, the old lady who sits and knits while the French Revolution rages, a list of targets to be guillotined concealed in her long scarf.A narrative history like this book, focused on a few exemplary figures, is vivid and easy to grasp. You can imagine yourself in the ...”

“... beyond himself. He was able to draw performances of a brave originality from Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth and Mac Liammóir as Iago. The voice of Nolan ascends to shouts that are an audible grimace and cries of forgetting that are nothing like innocence. Mac Liammóir’s Iago has a wider field to achieve his effects, and his walk is itself an essay in ...”

“... by distinguished-looking foreign gentlemen – Nabokov, Calvino – rather than a scruffy young lady in a combat jacket with a curly Jimi Hendrix crop. But the world caught up with her in the 1970s with the spread of women’s liberation and the founding in Britain of the feminist Virago Press. Carter was one of the first authors Virago recruited to its ...”

“... more farouche than ever and more suspicious of patronage, refusing to visit the Sitwells, dodging Lady Ottoline Morell, intimidating Virginia Woolf, but in the fire-lit bookshop, with Alida’s dogs and Harold Monro’s cat, there was no need for defensiveness. During the Twenties she acquired, also, an elderly beau. Sydney Cockerell, the director of the ...”

“... and satchel posed unforeseen difficulties. It would look suspicious to arrive at a hotel with a lady and baggage, then sit for who knows how many hours in the lobby with her and wait for a message from a Mr Smith. On the other hand, I couldn’t afford the luxury of renting a room for merely a few hours. And what about Zosia? Was I to take a double room for ...”

“... historical accounts of it are sparse; one of its few chroniclers claimed that ‘the Spanish Lady inspired no songs, no legends, no work of art.’ There are, in fact, two or three short stories about it – reclaimed for lit crit by Barbara Fass Leavy in To Blight With Plague – plus a couple of book-length historical accounts and a handful of articles ...”

“... aspired to present her to Queen Victoria. However, a libel case the couple brought against one of Lady Twiss’s former clients sensationally collapsed and Twiss was forced by the archbishop of Canterbury to disgorge his lucrative ecclesiastical positions. Ruined, he was getting by writing law textbooks when Leopold came calling. In Berlin, Twiss secretly ...”

“... Isadora had done well at the turn of the century, perhaps because she made English people think of Lady Hamilton’s ‘postures’, offering the same sort of naughtily Grecian, allegedly high-minded self-exposure that it was fine to watch from a certain emotional distance. Graham’s convulsed torso and odd gestures doubtless aroused unwelcome personal ...”

“... unfortunate Burbage arrived, Shakespeare was already ‘entertained and at his game’ with the lady, and is quoted as having said to his rival ‘William the Conqueror was before Richard III.’By 1600 the status of vernacular authors was high enough for them to be ‘quoted’ in the same way as classical poets, and so nosegays of flowers culled from ...”

“... to have befallen the English people. Dorril also confuses those two frightful Fascist moneybags, Lady Pearson and Viscountess Downe. Mosley’s headquarters, the Black House, cannot have been simultaneously in Chelsea and at 232 Battersea Park Road (in fact it was next to the Duke of York’s Barracks, not the Duke of Wellington’s). There is also a little ...”