“... This, say Barbara Skelton’s publishers, is the ‘second – and some people will be relieved to hear, final – volume of her riotous autobiography’. On page one of volume one there is a quotation from Harriette Wilson about the meaning of the term ‘gentleman’ – a subject not really very close to Skelton’s heart ...”

“... Bernard Shaw (in spite of his philandering, of which Beatrice strongly disapproved) was a regular guest at the famous Webb lunches. Manual workers were conspicuous by their absence. Possibly Beatrice never quite escaped from the conventional class feeling of the circles in which she grew up. Certainly the diary contains occasional expressions of dismay at the ...”

“... to involve his heterosexual partners in aspects of the Game. With his first wife, the art student Barbara Sherlock, to whom he got engaged when he was a 19-year-old virgin and she was 21, it turned out to be almost impossible to do this satisfyingly. With his second wife, Penelope Shuttle, he still felt some shame over his need for the Game, though she was ...”

“... Barbara Everett’s book consists of her four Northcliffe Lectures, given at University College London in 1988, on Hamlet and the other ‘major’ tragedies, together with a number of shorter pieces on Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Twelfth Night, and quite a lot more about Hamlet. This account may make the book sound scrappy, but it holds together ...”

“... purpose: it divides the action into that intensely social structure, the play of host and guest, makes it clear that at present Sicilia is the host and Bohemia the guest, but also intimates that such formalities can reverse themselves. The necessity for politeness, and its difficulty, are made equally clear. As the ...”

“... Nochlin called her a ‘Rococo subversive’. It might have seemed like a joke, but she meant it. Barbara Bloemink’s new biography continues in Nochlin’s provocative spirit. According to Bloemink, Stettheimer was a social documentarian whose work looks wryly at class, gender, religion and race in early 20th-century America. She makes a compelling ...”

“... easy to suspect, an oddly truncated memory of it. The poem begins as the Mariner stops the Wedding-Guest, is swiftly out at sea and into ‘the land of ice’, sees the shooting of the albatross and the becalming of the ship under a ‘hot and copper sky’, describes the arrival of the spectral ship and the death of the crew, and then continues as the Mariner ...”

“... sad but compelling tale of MacNeice’s involvement with the Corporation is excellently told by Barbara Coulton. She makes him a hero of tragic stature, intelligent, personable, convivial, saturnine, and disconcertingly hard to know. Her book is a well-composed portrait which itself owes much technically to the radio feature: it is like a patchwork of ...”

“... art – a similar design appears on the fifth or sixth-century doors of the church of Sitt Barbara in Cairo. In stitches, spaces and leather tooling, the Cuthbert Gospel shows itself to be the product of an international elite. These manuscripts – pinnacles of their art – illuminate the intellectual sophistication of Anglo-Saxon England; other ...”

“... assorted mob from the wider Labour movement: a constellation of leftist Bevanite MPs including Barbara Castle, accompanied by MPs from the pro-American right of the party and assorted trade unionists (some of them ‘allegedly quite ignorant freeloaders’, as Wright puts it, others equally ignorant fellow-travellers, and a few who remained shrewd and ...”

“... biographer, who has previously committed to paper the lives of Brian Johnston,2 Denis Compton,3 Barbara Cartland4 and Prince Philip,5like the other four biographical subjects she was also a household word in her day. This had nothing to do with hard work and natural ability – as, I would argue, it did in the other four cases – and everything to do with ...”

“... and gave a new lease of life to writers such as Rebecca West, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Comyns and Antonia White. White’s Frost in May, another study of the horrors of convent life, was one of Virago’s first notable successes when it was reissued in 1978. Other writers she championed had truly been forgotten: on Desert Island Discs, she ...”

“... arse, friend. Whenever I had occasion to observe him, Philip Larkin was himself a beautiful guest, kind, considerate, well-behaved and extremely funny. And in the poem, too, the invitation is accepted finally, against all internal resistance. But the société of the poem disintegrates steadily outwards towards its image of ‘the moon thinned/To an ...”

“... hobby-horse. In return, three years later, Flaubert proved a surprisingly agile and hearty guest at Christmas-time, dressing up as a woman and dancing a Spanish dance – though when he visited again al Nohant Sand rather went off him, deciding he was by this time too ‘literary’ and conversation-hogging from living on his own and less fun to be ...”

“... displeasure, without summoning the energy for a confrontation. She writes to Jerry, an English guest who left a copy of George Meredith’s The Egoist in the restaurant. She sees Meredith’s novel as being like a message from her father, another English George. She barely pays attention to what happens in the book, but dipping into it she encounters stray ...”