“... 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 ...”

“... leave. Shaking and white-faced, they passed through the jeering throng. ‘Prostitutes!’ an old lady shrieked. ‘Rats!’ A man tried to leave the building, helped through the mob by some elderly men dressed as Cossacks, but the protesters followed him down the road. ‘Beat him! Beat him!’ one of the old women cried, chivvying the protesters on. He was ...”

“... tone enhances and complicates meaning: ‘Suppose Henry Horne says something offensive to a young lady named Rita when her brother Charles is by to protect her. Can you hear the two different tones in which she says their respective names, “Henry Horne! Charles!” I can hear it better than I can say it.’ On other occasions, Frost makes his point by ...”

“... were born into an upper-middle-class London family: her father (whose sister, Elizabeth, became Lady Longford; Antonia Fraser is Harman’s cousin) was a doctor and her mother had qualified as a barrister, though she gave up work when she had children. Their four daughters were to be educated but marriageable; not too submissive or too assertive; and to be ...”

“... have secrets of his own. In a literary novel with a Connie and a Clifford there is certainly a Lady Chatterley allusion lurking, but it isn’t Connie who is the focus of attention here. The chapter is set just before the affair erupts, and the book avoids dramatising those events, but jumps forward again by a handful of years, leaving a scattered trail of ...”

“... Saracen’s Head’ of going with William and Dorothy Wordsworth to dinner with a certain literary lady in the neighbourhood of Grasmere and being served a meagre dinner while the hostess gobbled up the only pheasant; Coleridge’s old father, the vicar of Ottery St Mary, badly short-sighted, mistaking a lady’s gown for ...”

“... the News’, the widow has not been on speaking terms with Frau Doktor Schwarz, her land-lady, for a week.) If this is the comic germ of the story, the tragic germ occurred only a few months later, in March l922, when Nabokov’s father was assassinated, as he defended a political rival. The assassins didn’t even know who Nabokov’s father ...”

“... were at the desks in foyer and restaurant. But at breakfast next morning the familiar yellow-faced lady was there. Her eyes flickered hither and thither, sending silent signals to the staff. Her mouth was clamped in an enigmatic sardonic smile. Memsahib still owned the place, but her dominance had dwindled to management. Does that image mean that the nightmare ...”

“... it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while working as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State, dunned the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million backhander to the Contras and then lost the money in a Swiss computer error. Ronald Reagan sent three ...”

“... wrong. Those ‘lone middle-aged men with their barley wines’ watching the strip show at the Lady Godiva: bearing in mind that ‘middle-aged’ means the author’s age or younger, is that really what they’re drinking? Stranger drinks have survived in the marketplace, either by defiant unwholesomeness (Irn-Bru) or energetic rebranding (Lucozade). So ...”

“... or money you’re in a difficult position. It’s easier to refuse money. There was an elderly lady who repeatedly came here and brought me chocolates.’ Had he taken the gifts? Had he taken money? ‘Gifts, without a doubt. I won’t answer the second part of the question.’ Even allowing for the low season, the coast has a desolate air. A few heads in ...”