“... 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 ...”

“... Woman’; for Virginia Woolf she was a ‘dull impeccable Bostonian’, a ‘rich American snob lady’. Eliot’s ardour, and the reasons for it, passed his contemporaries by.Crawford’s biography restores Eliot’s devotion to view while keeping its object shadowy. His concern is with tracing the way Eliot’s ‘conception’ of Hale joined ...”

“... responding to, and in my mind’s eye (altered and confirmed) I see a small, nondescript old lady going bravely about her business. There are other signs that I am no longer young, but the ah-bless is the most open and public. Yet my Swedish correspondent said she found me ‘sad and pathetic’ for describing myself as old. So that’s me told, every ...”

“... has denounced Henry James and the semicolon. Among Roth’s mouthpieces is the oracular cleaning lady Faunia Farley in The Human Stain, who corrects the notion of the protagonist, a former professor, that sex is about more than sex: ‘No, it’s not. You just forgot what sex is.’ Her name is Faunia, see. Roth and McCarthy’s best novels may be as good as ...”

“... though I wasn’t listening.’ He has a sharp, disillusioned eye: ‘I stood behind one fat lady … The biggest wart on her neck was covered by the clasp of her necklace.’ In the spa town, Pechorin befriends a like-minded doctor called Werner. The two men, Pechorin thinks with self-satisfaction, share a cold egotism: ‘Sad things are funny to ...”

“... were eight. The seminarist’s eyes widen in alarm at this dangerous train of thought. At the Our Lady of Purification Church in the old fishing port of Kollum, I ask the priest, Fr Alphonse, about the original church, which has records going back to the sixth century. Is it perhaps under the present building, which dates from the 1980s? Might there be ...”

“... of Abydos, Lara, and the rest of the Eastern tales that followed. The lionisation, the affair with Lady Caroline Lamb that succeeded it, and the affair with his half-sister which succeeded that, the marriage, the separation, the exile: all depend to an incalculable extent on the success of Childe Harold. Most of what we do know about the way the manuscript ...”

“... a genially tolerant figure and a strong Europhile, has some surprising supporters, including Lady Olga Maitland. Portillo, for his part, has significant support on the Left of the Party. Tony Blair and Charles Kennedy would no doubt prefer Portillo, and at the moment, the Euro remains a real obstacle to Clarke’s leadership, unless the Party can ...”