“... bold your cry of ‘Checkmate, Shah maat!’ King Dad will rise again, his crown unspilled, his lady hard-faced at his side. You mustn’t think I’m gloating, now shiver when you hear the whispering of my skirts along the aisles where those dumb beasts, the backs of your heads, graze in their sensual doze. I’m miles from the queening square. Although no ...”

“... Scraped, slid off, like his vest was made of mithril. Lothlorien, Gonvilnd Keys. A gift from the Lady, or Arron Banks. Barings Bank. The plunderous karats of Antwerpus Loup. The bayonet tip wunt bite in the thick-seamed ephod, its armour of urin and bummin. Deep bruzing, dribling facets. Sum wailing: Paedo/haemo-philiac sadness. Bayonet tip at ...”

“... quotations. It draws not only on family documents, but on the writings of Macaulay, Emily Eden, Lady Canning, Bishop Heber, Kipling, Diana Cooper and Forster; and it comments, sometimes with disfavour, on films like Gandhi, The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown. If a book on this scale had been written by an American it would have carried ...”

“... Waldorf wrote to the Times to defend the Cliveden house parties and to insist that he and ‘Lady Astor’ were ‘no more fascists’ than communists: ‘To link our weekends with any particular clique is as absurd as is the allegation that those of us who desire to establish better relations with Germany or Italy are pro-Nazis or pro-Fascists.’ Like ...”

“... women gathered and the screaming started? Probably not. They planned on twisting me Into a little lady if it killed them But definitely would not want to be Anything but the smallest feet in town. Nowadays I think of those girls in China Who ran and pounced and almost flew until The day they never pounced or ran again. Their fledgling feet did not grow into ...”

“... existed between these people – were they subtle and melancholy as Sei Shonagon, witty as Lady Murasaki – did their houses have corridors or blinds, what did they whisper behind? Did they go from place to place slowly, as the Japanese courtiers did, composing in the endless lurching of the oxcart a tender thought, a poem to present on arrival at the ...”

“... eaten, the Man took the Frau‘s share of the pudding as well as his own.’ In Chekhov’s ‘The lady with the Dog’ there is a glorious supernumerary detail which perfectly illustrates the dual economy of the greatest short stories – an overall parsimony suddenly leavened by luxury. Fresh from their first adultery, the new lovers sit in the dawn’s ...”

“... a wholly disagreeable man who loves only two things: his art and his daughter. The daughter is a Lady-in-Waiting to the Grand Lord of Horikawa, whose particular design of darkness is to make her his mistress. When it becomes apparent that he will fail in this, he at first treats Yoshihide with some coldness, but then unexpectedly gives the artist a ...”

“... of the novel, was published not by a major publishing house but ‘at the risk of an American lady who had opened a bookshop in Paris’ is taken by Kenner to indicate the timidity of the age, and the heroism both of the American lady and of the book’s initial purchasers, who knew a triumph of the will to literature ...”

“... of Genji, a psychological novel written at the beginning of the 11th century by a Japanese court lady. The novel is twice the length of War and Peace, and no generation of writers in Japan has been able to ignore it. Genji has been admired, attacked and imitated, some ten thousand books have been written about it and countless articles dedicated to it in the ...”

“... is the fear of teeth. Good to know, but surely raises some questions. Whose teeth? What about that lady on the catafalque in the Poe story? Berenice: I think that was her name. Everyone seemed to love her teeth. And what exactly is a catafalque, by the way? I’m an English professor, but I have to admit, I’m not sure. Or was it Ligeia? And then there’s ...”

“... world of Society, lunched with Browning and dined with Matthew Arnold, and visited Lord This and Lady That and the Honourable Whatshisname. The Hardy that we have at the end of the volume is a prosperous, middle-aged English Man of Letters, someone who might have written the works of, say, Edmund Gosse, or Walter Besant. But a career is not a life. There was ...”

“... all,’ or Jonathan Swift, who, at the conclusion of that catalogue of excremental horrors ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, has his speaker remark: ‘Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/Because she rose from stinking Ooze?’ Or even Samuel Johnson. If women’s writing were taken into account, would it change the way we read and judge the poetry of an era ...”

“... possible, was not as great a choke-pear for women writers as the attitudes of ‘Epistle to a Lady’. Swift proved friendlier to women than Pope. He was of practical assistance to individual women writers – specifically, Irish women such as Mary Barber and Constantia Grierson. More important, Swift’s abjuration of the grand line in favour of the ...”

“... half a century before the social purity trend was reversed, after the Wolfenden Report and the Lady Chatterly trial. Soon afterwards came the Beardsley revival, gathering momentum with the retrospective exhibition organised in London in 1966 by Brian Reade. The Nineties had gone underground for seventy years, resurfacing only when the hold of Late ...”