“... sighs, and the show goes ahead. What he made of the obscenely gross, nude Rhine-daughters or bag-lady Norns is not hard to guess. Before that, in his first Ring, he had endured Yuri Lubimov’s crass Rheingold (Lubimov had been Haitink’s own choice) and, when that was wisely aborted by Isaacs, the claustrophobic vision, inspired by the Washington ...”

“... of tuberculosis at the age of 24 but was famously resurrected in the heroines of The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Wings of the Dove (1902), and the American writer, Constance Fenimore Woolson, James’s intermittent companion and occasional fellow lodger for over a decade, who apparently committed suicide by hurling herself from the window of her Venetian ...”

“... in 1936, where he confused his superiors with extravagant suggestions for adaptations – Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Rabelais. From there his progress was meteoric. When he decided to get married, he fixed on Cleo, a pretty waitress at an all-night restaurant, and courted her every night for about a year; he also hired private detectives to ...”

“... of playing the courtier, pursuing the politics of intervention through his courtly masque, The Lady of May, he found a country bolt-hole and even a Cave of Adullam at Wilton, the new home of his sister Mary, who had married the Earl of Pembroke. The frustration felt by a young man whose thwarted thirst for virtuous action could easily turn to undisciplined ...”

“... of defence staff, Sir Peter Harding, was having an affair with the very nearly perfectly named Lady Bienvenida Buck. Even amid his rejoicing at the 80,000 extra copies he sold and feeling like ‘I’ve won an Olympic gold medal for gutter journalism or something – utterly, deliciously intoxicating,’ he spares a thought for his victims: ‘I must admit ...”

“... liquidation of the Jews in Bolechów some were ‘tortured for 24 hours’. He asked a very old lady in Bolechów what ‘being tortured for 24 hours’ might mean. She told us that the Jews had been herded into the Catholic community centre at the northern edge of the town, and that there the Germans had forced the captive Jews to stand on each other’s ...”

“... trodden’ on his heart, complaining of ‘giddiness and faintness’ (‘which is so like a fine lady, that I am rather ashamed of the disorder’), and hoping to lose weight, Byron had hired the very young Polidori (who two years earlier had taken his medical degree at Edinburgh, aged 19) to accompany him as his travelling physician. The arrangement lasted ...”

“... of a tank; that he was suspected of treachery as a result of a letter he received from a lady while he was at Delft – but these details are usually subordinated to, and for most modern readers awkwardly combined with, attempts to allegorise or moralise them. Gascoigne’s account of his experiences in Holland in ‘Dulce Bellum Inexpertis’ is ...”

“... actually – as I don’t think it is in Ashbery and not often in O’Hara, apart from ‘The Day Lady Died’ – responsibility. Where it shows most, and most surprisingly, is in the endings of the poems. Again, this is hard to show by quoting, but time and again a poem that looks to be this, then that, then the other thing, will have a proper ending. A ...”

“... insistence on an eastern orientation and the nature of the site they had acquired from Lady Russell (the Bedford family owned much of Bloomsbury). It was quite small, already surrounded by houses, and longer from north to south than from east to west. James Gibbs, one of the surveyors appointed by the Commissioners (Hawksmoor was the ...”

“... mattered, D.H. Lawrence. ‘I don’t in the least want to turn you out of your hut,’ says Lady Chatterley to the gamekeeper. ‘It’s your ladyship’s own ‘ut,’ replies her rough trade, demonstrating by a single apostrophe that real men have no business aping their betters. The movement towards standardisation took off in the second half of the ...”

“... their consequences. He did not have to fight for his own interests – his waspish sister-in-law Lady Frances Balfour said: ‘Arthur’s opportunities were all made for him’ – and he found it hard to imagine that those less fortunate would fight for theirs. He told his sister Evelyn Rayleigh that ‘his mind did not naturally turn to politics. He never ...”

“... director, Christopher DeMuth, responded that he had ‘communed’ with the ghost of the Iron Lady, who had let him know that she was ‘on board’ with the circus of flag, family and nation. When the proceedings began, the agenda was dominated by wokeness. Woke schools and woke universities, of course, but also the new nemesis: ‘woke capital’.Woke ...”

“... after it was opened with great pomp in the spring of 1869. Hawkers preferred not to be herded into Lady Angela Burdett-Coutts’s carefully designed neo-Gothic market; the view its founder took of them might have seemed clear from the way the space was decorated with injunctions to ‘Be Sober’ and ‘Be Courteous’. Meanwhile, street markets, which saw ...”

“... excited by the ‘children in rags, the scabies, the ringworm, the lepers’. Shelley’s friend Lady Blessington, who was rather shrewder, recognised the element of showmanship in this ‘hyperbolical’ performance to a captive audience, most of whom had little means of knowing what they should pay or whose services they might best employ.The hermitage was ...”