“... I believe wherever she goes and casts an eye into the masculine world, she is the sovereign lady, the ruler.’ These sovereign qualities lasted long after her looks had faded. When Elias Canetti met her in 1933, he observed an ‘inebriated individual, who looked much older than she was’, large and overflowing, ‘with a cloying smile and ...”

“... the distance. The brief bio announced he was ‘the youngest son of Lieut-Col. Aymer Maxwell and Lady Mary Percy, fifth daughter of the 7th Duke of Northumberland’. Bit posh for my taste, I thought, but I opened it nonetheless, and read the first lines: ‘I sit in a pitch-pine panelled kitchen-living room, with an otter asleep upon its back among the ...”

“... to photograph our weary troop struggling uphill, with one of the signs in the foreground, a large lady sprung from her house to mark my card. Her discreet advertisement, the size of a monster TV screen, was not intended for public consumption. It stood on private property. How she and her partner, hovering with menace in the doorway, intended to vote was ...”

“... surprised by impromptu shows of sympathy. Delivering a letter by hand, she was met by a cleaning lady who told her that ‘the Russians’ would avenge her. Walking along near home, thinking about her shoes, she was stopped by a stranger who announced in a loud voice: ‘A French Catholic shakes you by the hand … and next, revenge!’ Within a year she ...”

“... moves seem straight from the narratology textbooks: the Stephen Hero office clock epiphany, the Lady with Lapdog but-we’re-only-just-beginning ending. A stalled playwright, recently shafted by a Hollywood agent, drops in despair into a Times Square peepshow; he weeps, hopelessly, for his ex-girlfriend, for God, for life; he drops in his money and the ...”

“... We never, that I recall, filled them in on who Virginia Woolf was or put them in the picture about Lady Ottoline Morrell; Sapper, Buchan, Osbert Sitwell – to the boys these must have been names only, familiar to the principal players, John Gielgud and Paul Eddington, but as remote to the rest of the cast as historical figures in Shakespeare. This omission ...”

“... about the fracas, she says. ‘There was always part of him that gloried in his reputation as a lady-killer, the sinful, depraved Don Juan. The mad, bad, dangerous-to-know sadist.’ I now wonder if part of his ardent embrace of Look Back in Anger – ‘I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger,’ he memorably pronounced ...”

“... private conversation of the family. Gates thinks that she may have been Jane’s replacement as lady’s maid, serving the Wheeler household in 1856 and escaping the following year. John Hill Wheeler kept a diary, parts of which are intact; a theatre-goer, he records seeing John Wilkes Booth in the part of Shylock, and thinking him a very promising ...”

“... Almighty when rebuking his son, but even the plain-spoken Hotspur, the man who complains that his lady swears ‘like a comfit-maker’s wife’ and ought to use ‘a good mouth-filling oath’, cannot declare ‘By God, I cannot flatter.’ This feature may improve this edition’s chances of becoming the set text at small Baptist colleges in the Bible Belt ...”

“... a number of Pakistani historians) who allege that Nehru’s intimacy with Lady Mountbatten helped India get a better deal than it deserved when the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 are way off the mark. Credit for that must go to the weak-kneed leaders of the Muslim League. The task facing the first post-independence government was ...”

“... produced surprises. Not everyone had known that there were quite so many images of a huge, winged lady Dawn raping ephebes, but here they were, page after page of them, or that Sisyphus had been mysteriously involved with Odysseus’ mother, that the first bird to abduct Ganymede was not an eagle but a swan, or that beloved Iolaus was also popular in ...”

“... for supper, and an endless hostOf syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies,And other such lady-like luxuries –You could wish you were ...”

“... mouth of a gun and blowing them into sticky pieces which often floated down onto the dresses of lady spectators had been a regular feature of British retribution, from Hector Munro in Bengal in 1764 to Deputy Commissioner Cowan in the Punjab, who executed fifty prisoners by blowing them from guns after the Kuka outbreak in 1872. Sir Robert ...”

“... her captor uses to describe his actions. ‘Then I went downstairs and made love to my little lady’ – the formula generates a hideous frisson every time. On a grander scale, Lolita continues to destabilise its readers by constantly blurring the line that divides normal from abnormal, love from abuse. In The Discomfort of Evening there’s no whisper ...”

“... that hardly features here, was a social star of the highest order, and was fabulously rich. Lady Tweedsmuir opined that ‘she never had to catch a bus or think about the price of fish.’Why should we feel sorry for Edward Grey? He had a wonderful life. He gained financial independence when he was twenty. He had complete freedom to pursue a country ...”