“... tacit understanding was that Chekhov might have girlfriends to stay, but Masha was to remain the lady of the house. Those that accepted these rules could retain the friendship of both brother and sister: Olga Kundasova, the radical feminist ‘astronomer’, lasted, first as mistress, then as psychiatric patient, finally as friend, for twenty years. Even ...”

“... off.’ Long before he was demonised by the Victorians, the inventor of the Yahoos and ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ was shown as a self-destroying misanthrope. As Glendinning says, Swift’s death ‘unleashed a spate of speculation and analysis which continues to this day’. Much of it has not been charitable. One of the best things about ...”

“... cry of pain at the news of her engagement. Hardly less intriguing are the numerous letters to Lady Louisa de Rothschild, an attractive, bookish (and very rich) woman who shared his intellectual interests far more than his wife did. Characteristic of this relationship is the letter in which he reports how the irreverent preface to his Essays in Criticism ...”

“... liked were Jebb the public orator and Mrs Jebb,’ he wrote later: ‘but Mrs Jebb is an American lady and so is naturally unlike Cambridge and indeed thoroughly charming.’ In the first version of his book, published in 1951, Lord Annan obviously thought it sensible of Stephen to get out: ‘most young dons who tear themselves away from the numbing embrace ...”

“... her widespread popularity as well as much-needed cash. When the sketches had first appeared in the Lady’s Magazine of 1819, sales of the periodical had multiplied eightfold, and five volumes in the series had been published in the intervening years. The bulk of Mitford’s earnings as a writer were rapidly squandered by her dreadful father – that ...”

“... his first wife. It would have been good to read about Godwin’s first meeting with that lady if the account had not been misprinted thus: ‘When he lauded Horne Tooke, Dr Johnson and Voltaire, she declared prescription, prejudice, and the British Constitution. Like that such lavish praise disagreed on religion: Godwin was a sceptical ...”

“... novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither ...”

“... allowing him to participate in romanticism and rebellion and to fall in love with a wild Scots lady, and then bringing him safely home to a hereditary estate and marriage with an English rose. The formula is more perfunctory in Pushkin but also more effective in the detail of the text. Grinev’s efforts at achievement in the romantic style are pointedly ...”

“... affectionate portrait of a granny wrangling with a market stallholder – De yam good? Old lady, get yuh nails outta meh yam! Ah mad tuh make yuh buy it now you damage it so bad Dis yam look like de one dat did come off ah de ark She brother in de Botanical Gardens up dey by Queens Park Tourists with dey camera comin’ from all over de ...”

“... untypical, and here the accounts we have are largely those of the better-off. Lord William Nevill, Lady Constance Lytton, Jabez Balfour and the suffragettes: their views reflect the redoubled degradation felt by prisoners drawn from a better social class. In other words, his overall picture does not compensate sufficiently for the fact that, as he himself ...”

“... art of refinement, of precision. Somehow it is typical that she should write, not about the famous Lady of Shalott, but about her more obscure relation, the Gentleman of Shalott. On that Pullman to Boston, she is sick: ‘I threw up, yellow, into something I referred to ... as a “hopper”.’ That ‘yellow’ is priceless, funny, and an example of good ...”

“... at Macy’s, ‘mankind thriving in their solitudes in shoes’. Here he stumbles on a bag-lady living in ‘a niche between buildings with tin canopy/shelter from cold rain’, surrounded by pots and pans and plates, on her head a ‘motheaten rabbit-fur hat’, her teeth no more than ‘hard flat flowers arranged around her gums. Of course it is ...”

“... very senior official in the Carter White House allowed a woman the wires later described as ‘the lady from Peru’ to stick a halt-dozen spoonfuls of Bolivian cocaine up his Oval Office nostrils. It was the snort heard round America and the sound ignited a series of horrible nationwide news reports and twisted political events that led to the total ...”

“... this strain, reinforcing his disbelief in the accusations: You enquire what the fugitive Lady has in her power. She has, I think, nothing in her power but to return home and mend her behaviour. To obtain a separate maintenance she must prove either cruelty to her person or infidelity to her bed, and I suppose neither charge can be supported. Nature ...”

“... tells him, ‘I love you more and more every day,’ she can write that Kinnaird ‘told Shelley lady Byron usually called your Wife was in good health and on a visit to Mrs Leigh’. Since Claire knew quite well (he had told her) of Byron’s incestuous passion for his half-sister Augusta Leigh, that sentence is surely a nicely-judged double blow. A few ...”