“... had another connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son William in 1921, John Butler Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’ Butt enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the ...”

“... above all, the charmed, successful Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady (Maureen had certainly not read Shaw, for whom Colin evinced another of his hatreds). Nancy’s songs were very much a feature of Maureen’s repertoire, but with Eliza she had a daily complicity. Eliza’s songs, both before and after Higgins’s breakthrough, were forever on her lips. When ...”