“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sexual difference then rears its head, and La Bruyère’s absent-minded hero ‘pays a visit to a lady, and imagines that she is visiting him’, eventually inviting her to stay for supper.The apparent link between hospitality and patriarchy takes Derrida back to the story of Lot, as related in the book of Genesis. Lot is a stranger living in the city of ...”

“... certain things. He felt that to some extent she was playing a part, more court jester than crazy lady. She was always trying to embrace André and didn’t understand his resistance, but then no one had told her that she had been replaced in his life. During one meal by the pool, with André absent, she said that she knew what was the matter with him – he ...”

“... lend its name to the occasion). Foreign adventurers would soon take note; so apparently did Our Lady, who from the beginning had been central to the order’s pride and belief in its mission, but who now no longer delivered them victories. Already her services to Christendom were more urgently required in the Balkans against the growing threat from the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... under him at sea, as Dollyrumple-Amilton. While dancing he seemed quite at home with the great lady, laughing and speaking, with a courtly bend, into her ear, though he became formal and submissive during the ceremonies of departure. It struck me that very senior officers, the real thing, and their women got on more easily with subordinates like Archer ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that Joyce was treated ‘quite regally’. Margaret Joyce, too, began to broadcast, and Lord and Lady Haw-Haw moved into a swanky flat on Kastanien-Allee. Joyce remained the key presence in the Berlin Rundfunk even after Goebbels had begun to wonder, with the Soviet Union and the US having joined the war, whether Haw-Haw’s ‘biting criticism’ was the ...”