“... 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 ...”

“... on the road through Savoy at an inn with only one bedroom, has to sleep next to a travelling lady in beds ‘that stood parallel, and so very close to each other as only to allow space for a small wicker chair betwixt them’. Sterne’s narrative breaks off in the middle of the night (just as Yorick has ‘accidentally’ stretched out his arm and ...”

“... with Charles in the hamlet of Huntworth, Somerset, where they could be visited at will by the lady of the manor, who spoke to them without ever ‘removing her gloves’. Free TB treatment had been available since 1921, administered by local authorities, but conditions inside sanatoriums varied and Iris left school to care for her mother. Being a daughter ...”

“... far fewer imagine themselves as middle-aged. In Britain between the wars a respectable young lady, dependent on her father for an allowance, had limited options. She expected and was expected to marry. A graduate might find professional employment, but the marriage bar stymied careers in many areas, including teaching and the civil service. Marriage ...”

“... a passage in Aurora Leigh where Romney patronises the almost self-taught Aurora for writing ‘lady’s Greek,/Without the accents’. This is just the start of a complaint about women who want to be clever and poetical when they should be supporting men who are trying to improve the world: ‘Work man, work woman, since there’s work to do,/In this ...”

“... out of ten’ they would be effective. If they didn’t work, she advised him to return with his lady friend and that it would cost him $200 (around $5000 today). Instead, he returned two weeks later with the police and an arrest warrant. ‘You’ve brought quite a party with you,’ Restell said.She hired an aggressive lawyer – Orlando T. Stewart, a ...”

“... suggested by Robert Giroux, Berryman’s publisher and old friend from Columbia days. The Blonde Lady of the sonnets was given the pseudonym ‘Lise’. As editor of the Collected Poems, 1937-1971, Charles Thornbury has decided to follow the final 1947 version, thus restoring Lise’s real name and the sequence’s original title, ‘Sonnets to Chris’. (He ...”