“... a piece by Anthony Powell called ‘A Reference for Mellors’, which was about somebody coming to Lady Chatterley for a reference for a gamekeeper. The magazine sort of launched me on a career, because Alan Pryce-Jones, who was then the editor of the TLS, gave me a lot of reviewing work. AH: How did you see your future then? FW: I suppose I feebly wanted to ...”

“... of heroine. Despite the Victorians’ enthusiasm for weeping over the beheadings of Anne Boleyn or Lady Jane Grey (perhaps a deliberate attempt to embrace a Protestant alternative to Mary’s Popish pathos), the British have in general preferred their emblematic women to remain in one piece. Britannia and her latter-day personifications are supposed to rule ...”

“... undergraduate, ‘Henry’, in the form of a long-enduring tenderness felt by a 50-year-old maiden lady for a married and unlovable Archdeacon. The very ability so to rework her own situation suggests a remarkable detachment, humour and originality: all in all, a literary power well outside anything shown in these journals. Perhaps Barbara Pym merely lacked ...”

“... her romancing schoolgirl sister, already established by Elizabeth Jordan as an avid believer in Lady Hermione’s Terrible Secret, rushes up to her and pleads unexpectedly for forgiveness: ‘Lorraine wanted [Billy] to write out exactly what he knew, and he didn’t know anything except about the telegram and how the letter got wuzzled, and I told him I’d ...”

“... combining these in a little volume with an admirable rendering of Lermontov’s ‘The Tambov Lady’, a narrative poem in the Onegin metre which he employs with as much virtuosity as in his previous Pushkin translations. Johnston hopes that poetry can still be ‘authorised to entertain’, and shows that if you are good enough you don’t have to bother ...”

“... journal and devised the slogan ‘Isis is written for the Don in the Street, not the Old Lady in North Oxford’. We collaborated on parodies of Time, Punch and Reader’s Digest, and on a scabrous Christmas pantomime called A Pumpkin Named Desire: A Seasonal Perversion in Three Indecent Acts. We also wrote the dialogue for a satirical movie about ...”

“... circumventing them. At times ‘no mandarin would speak to us – so the office was run by an old lady and a child’, one of her private secretaries remembered. She relied instead on political will, her influence with Wilson and on Lord Goodman, a lawyer and old friend who was quickly co-opted. His presence made her job much easier and a number of people ...”

“... world – a friend of Nicolsons, Lehmanns and Woolfs, who lunched with Eliot, Herbert Read and Lady Ottoline Morrell, and a reviewer in the leading journals. A pamphlet, Twenty Poems, had appeared to much acclaim in 1930, and three years later Poems was published by Faber to strikingly good reviews. ‘Another Shelley speaks in these lines,’ Herbert Read ...”

“... means or to create needless delays’. That is, the government is not to be blocked.No more Lady Hales, and no more John Bercows either. At the time of writing, Bercow is the first retiring Speaker of the UK Parliament not to be offered a peerage in 230 years; his bullying of Commons staff is the official reason given. We should mention here the ...”

“... Ours! Not yours to give out as a favour when you’re finished with it. Everything you have, white lady, is already mine. I don’t have to ask.’ This could have been produced by the reader without help from the writer. What the reader hopes to find in a novel set in a turbulent period of recent history is imaginative understanding, not sloganising followed ...”

“... been a domestic servant). She gave her initial statement to the Metropolitan Police’s first ‘lady assistant’, Eilidh MacDougall, who ran the newly opened Police Home for Women and Girls. MacDougall was the daughter of a barrister, and before joining the police had looked after ‘friendless’ women and girls in Southwark. Part of her job now was to ...”

“... its downs, and its traps at its ending. The title of the collection derives from The Portrait of a Lady – the moment when Isabel Archer, determined to marry the wrong person, ‘went on, having caught a glimpse, as she thought, of the heroic line and desiring to advance in that direction’ – and Ricks enlists ‘desiring to advance in that direction’ as ...”

“... slaving away or – worse – out of work would have been sufficient to mark you out as a ‘lady’. What could be grander than lounging around upstairs, nibbling at the stock when the fancy took you, brushing out your curls? She and Katie would still spend hour upon hour getting ready to go out – to Cardiff, or to Pontypridd, to some tea-shop, or to ...”

“... apt one is, sometimes, to say just the thing most mal-à-propos. I was calling not long ago on a lady, whose husband suffers from periodic attacks of madness – so that one would wish to avoid all allusion to so painful a subject: and before I knew what I was saying, I found myself in the middle of a comic story about a madman! This is indeed ...”

“... hugely exciting. When the day came, Sonya waited at the altar in the Church of the Nativity of Our Lady, close by her home for an hour before Tolstoy appeared. He had realised at the last moment that he had no shirt for the ceremony. Immediately afterwards, they set off for Yasnaya Polyana, his country estate, 120 miles south of Moscow; and a house with no ...”