“... 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 ...”

“... In such poems as ‘A Song of the English’, ‘The Houses (A Song of the Dominions)’, ‘Our Lady of the Snows’, ‘The Native-Born’, and many others, one can see Kipling trying with a certain desperation to resolve the conflict between his enthusiasm for the world-straddling greatness of Britain, on the one hand, and, on the other, for everything ...”

“... we knew Mr Benjamin to have been Jewish, we made no remark and left this declaration to his lady companion. She never said anything of the kind and let them take the body of the defunct. The refugees’ clothes were set out to dry, they retired for a brief rest, and well after dark in a pummelling thunderstorm they were taken to catch the night train ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of a 17th-century English traveller, Luke Gernon, who explained that on a typical visit ‘the lady of the house meets you with her tray … salutations past, you shall be presented with all the drinkes in the house,’ and having ascended to the main chamber, which was located on the top floor where the walls were thinnest to allow maximum space, ‘you ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Baby.Abortion turns out to be lucky, too, for the lovers in Céline Sciamma’s film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). We are in pre-revolutionary France and Marianne, a Parisian artist, has been ferried to an island off the coast of Brittany to paint a portrait of Héloïse. It is to be sent to Italy, to the man Héloïse’s parents have picked out for her ...”

“... and smokey-voiced balladeers than towards disco, where I might come across the occasional young lady. Not long after my brother unburdened himself to me I wound up living with him for extended periods, setting up camp on the couch where we had smoked so many joints and eaten so many pistachio nuts. Of course, I was delighted by the arrangement. To my ...”

“... with girls (Hardy presumably knew whether this was a true or false appearance); of a Venetian lady it says, ‘it is not known whether the Italian Contessa in A Group of Noble Dames was suggested by her’ (it must have been known by Hardy); and apropos his mood in 1870 it plays the detective: ‘a minute fact seems to suggest that Hardy was far from ...”

“... own, actual or merely mental, in the darkest of dark shades. Like the beautiful-to-raddled leading lady in some fantastical Ages of Woman (she died at an empress-like 81), Colette lived out virtually every sexual permutation known to woman with both gymnastic gusto and a sophisticated bon goût. There was the Plump and Horny Older Man, of course: the notorious ...”