“... down the staircase or, having begun to do so, would retreat thinking, “There’s that eccentric Lady Levey crawling across the hall.”’ In 1983, Brophy was told she had multiple sclerosis, ‘or, rather, that the results of all the tests thoroughly conformed with my having it – a presumably legalistic formula that reminded me of my sending ...”

“... wheeling and dealing of casting actors’ who dropped in and out, including Winona Ryder as Lady Anne and Kevin Spacey as the Duke of Buckingham. Michael Mann loaned him some of the Heat crew. Pacino’s highlights reel would show him playing numerous characters who felt a terrifying disconnect – from Tony Montana to Bobby in The Panic in Needle Park ...”

“... of the studio system. Talking about his second film, Le Petit Soldat, he invoked Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai, which David Thomson has seen as ‘deconstructing’ film noir. Une femme est une femme reminded him of Lubitsch’s supposed ‘failure’, Design For Living, and Richard Quine’s decidedly minor My Sister Eileen. Godard treated Hollywood as ...”

“... in their bunks would, it seems, pull nails out even of the hull to give as presents to their lady friends at the same time that the island lads in canoes were pulling nails out for themselves. Or, to turn the question on its head: why, when Cook was increasingly violent in dealing with annoyances, treating offending Hawaiians with cruelty and shooting at ...”

“... woman in film noir magnetises female viewers as well as male. Gay audiences of No Way to Treat a Lady (1968) could be under no illusions that Rod Steiger’s campy vaudeville turn was any sort of sympathetic portrayal of a homosexual, but they took to their hearts the taunting catchphrase he used: ‘Doesn’t make me a bad person.’ So, too, with the ...”

“... of Teddy and niece of Sir James. I was Peter’s best man. Bianca Jagger was Dido’s best lady’); the Thatcherite on-yer-bike business memoirs (lists of flights, airport hotel massages, exotic sunsets, cockerels’ balls for dinner); jollies out East with the dictator-friendly Lord Moynihan (Philippine brothels staffed by nuns and midgets); tennis ...”

“... parallels with his British colleague. Tall, with piercing blue eyes, Sorge seemed cut out to be a lady-killer, his part-Russian looks making him a kind of Yul Brynner with dark wavy hair (Brynner was born in Vladivostok). Philby, more the tweedy Trevor Howard type, was also reckoned a handsome man. Their appeal to women, however, depended on more than ...”

“... porn involving consenting adults. His refrigerator has a truly amazing capacity for beer and his lady friends of all ages have very audible cigarette lighters. There are some menus, gracefully thrown together, but the Narrator seems to eat more spaghetti than anything else. He slurps it up, in fact, which fits well with the oral passions elsewhere on ...”

“... ability to change identities and create new selves, ends – from Daisy Miller to Portrait of a Lady to The Golden Bowl – in confinement. Against all the evidence, Ellison proposed that James had grasped the basis of that paradox in white freedom and black servitude. Although there may seem to be nothing amusing about this racial division, the United ...”

“... society hostess and philanthropist Eugenie Schwarzwald, who was, as Delany describes her, ‘Lady Ottoline Morrell, Beatrice Webb, A.S. Neill and Margot Asquith, all rolled into one’. Schwarzwald surrounded herself with a hand-picked group of youngsters who were invited to spend their holidays in her country house, which she ran like a summer camp. It ...”

“... head (‘The Gift’), then a groovy song about an operation performed without anaesthetic (‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’). There’s a fair amount of blood spilled, a lot of Grand Guignol – and a heavy dose of juvenile idiocy – in these songs. It’s worth thinking about why this has been tolerated, even admired in the case of the Velvet ...”

“... though James hoped she would live on in his portraits of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Millie Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902). The third (uncompleted) volume, The Middle Years, published in 1917, a year after James’s own death, brings his life to early maturity in 1878, when he was 35. The only single-volume edition of the ...”

“... in fact already moved into the arena. In 1895 a French court had ordered Whistler to hand over to Lady Eden his portrait of her, on the ground that her personality right in it overrode his proprietary right to it, a decision reversed on appeal only when Whistler obliterated her features. And in an odd anticipation of the Gorden Kaye case, the same court in ...”

“... Angela Brazil, given to saying such things as ‘What a lark! What a sell!’ Converted as an old lady to the new religion, she conceives the duty of her piety to be the discovery and excavation of the True Cross. She is impatient with the theologians who are meanwhile busy inventing Christian metaphysics: ‘There’s a solid chunk of wood waiting for them ...”

“... in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a Trotskyist’: ‘Lady, I ain’t no Trotskyist. You should read up on the position of the USA Socialist Party on war, etc, and you will find that it is exactly ye old Leninist principle that the POUM stands for: turn imperialist war into civil war.’ Who was or wasn’t ...”