“... reason to believe that the Government’s policies are benign in inspiration. Rather the reverse. Lady Thatcher as prime minister was entirely open in her determination to destroy those quasi-constitutional conventions of British political life which underlay the hated ‘consensus’ and the country’s decline. Moreover, the language of a bastard ...”

“... the advances of girls who pursued him into mildly romantic friendship. A particularly relentless lady, Lydia Avilova, was pacified by being put to work hunting up the early stories through old newspapers and magazines, so that they could be assembled for a collected edition. Chekovian things from his own plays or stories were apt to happen to Chekhov. I ...”

“... social dimension. It is a curious thought that one of the most famous of all, Chekhov’s ‘Lady with the Dog’ could only have taken place as it did where it did, although it seems universal in what it tells and means. Yet Gurov and the lady would have had no story at another time and in another country. The same ...”

“... In 1916, D.H. Lawrence wrote to Lady Cynthia Asquith of his abiding ‘sadness’: ‘for my country, for this great wave of civilisation, 2000 years, which is now collapsing’. Driving to Garsington, Ottoline Morrell’s country seat, he was overwhelmed with a sense of so much beauty and pathos of old things passing away and no new things coming ...”

“... part of it at Cambridge, had experienced a romantic tragedy and also a brief affair with Lady Caroline Lamb; and at 29 had already published several novels. The idea of writing about Pompeii had been suggested to him by a picture he had seen in the Brera at Milan. Till now the picture’s identity has remained unknown, but my colleague Robert ...”

“... The work ‘fuck’ and its derivatives were timidly admitted into English fiction after the Lady Chatterley trial. Angus Wilson and Iris Murdoch are said to have steeled themselves and forced the f-words into their prose. At first they fairly leaped off the page, but forty-odd years later they have settled in and may occur in almost any work of ...”

“... to say, very little idea of what it might be like working on a chain gang). In 1934 he married Lady Violet Pakenham. Alas, as with Maud, you don’t get much of a sense of Lady Violet from Barber, who fancies himself as rather droll (he is the author also of a witty biography of Simon Raven), and his endearing, if ...”

“... he had identified becoming a parody of itself. In May 1917 Sassoon goes to stay with Lord and Lady Brassey. Lord Brassey is ‘a pattern Englishman, no doubt, very wise in the ways of his generation, a useful servant of the State, but a strange figure to Youth in Revolt, and Youth torn by sacrifice. His wisdom has had its day ... Death presses him ...”

“... suddenly the man burst into flames ... The table rose from the floor before my very eyes ... The lady went into a trance and found herself reliving her earlier life as a servant to the King of France ... The spoon bent without the boy so much as touching it ...’ etc. Next comes the liberal-minded physicist who on the face of it appears quite willing to ...”

“... is concerned is shown by novels as different as Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Portrait of a Lady. The ‘puzzle’ in the former concerns, for Sutherland, the question of whether Alec D’Urberville is to be regarded technically as a rapist. Was Tess raped, or was she seduced? Sutherland, taking this as an important legal question, inclines to the view ...”

“... Russell. There is a couple who lived for a year in a cave in Central Park; Jane Barnell, a lady with a beard 13½ inches long; the nine-year-old child prodigy Philippa Duke Schuyler, who reads Plutarch, plays poker, and has composed more than sixty pieces for the piano; and Commodore Dutch, ‘a brassy little man who has made a living for the last ...”

“... on skipping, When with his royal shipping The narrow seas are shady, And Charles brings home the lady. ‘Sure up’/‘Europe’ is a hiccuping drunken rhyme so bad as to acknowledge that the reality is likely to be harder to achieve than it sounds. Jonson is careful to separate slightly events in the Palatinate from those in Spain: skipping (prompted no ...”

“... The Female Detective, a collection of stories, came soon afterwards in 1864, and Revelations of a Lady Detective the same year; all were serialised. The Notting Hill Mystery is presented as a dossier of evidence collected by an insurance agent, Ralph Henderson, investigating the mysterious death of a woman whose husband had taken out five life insurance ...”

“... teach him useful things. Before long, he’s involved in an affair with a married Englishwoman, Lady Dudley. She is as passionate and transgressive as Madame de Mortsauf is chaste and sober. Lady Dudley is one of Balzac’s more enjoyable rakes, reminiscent of Byron’s ‘frolic grace’, ...”