“... they stand to a possible fact. If Walter de la Mare had known a disquieting and dominating old lady, and written about her, he would not also have been able to write the masterpiece of ‘Seaton’s Aunt’. The process works another way, too. In his splendid stories John Updike creates a far more telling image of himself as a denizen of suburban ...”

“... always seemed to settle me back then. Those with whom I lived considered me vain, excepting the Lady M, with whom I tirelessly played, Parcheesi, Scrabble, less circumscribed games. She would have bought for me a giant gold medallion could she have managed the expense, if only I would let her. Presently the soup was the colour of the room; everything ...”

“... Postwar The ruin on the island keeps away fragmented steps, shoulder bone of upper-storey arch, lady chapel, rank of skinned arms cracked at the wrist. New houses creep near like animals listening to the old – Teach Me Tonight – magnified through a trumpet fixed to the motherboard. My time was blonde scraped up in a froth. Now our white hair is arranged ...”

“... who the author of Pamela was when he wrote Shamela, but did know when he praised Clarissa. When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said ‘I heartily despise [Richardson] and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his works in a most scandalous manner,’ she was responding simultaneously to the power of the novels and to a personality felt through the work to be ...”

“... be missing. ‘Was Varlamov here today?’ a woman’s voice asks – that of a fine, but kind lady. What scenes these are. Splendour and misery. Servitude and its transfiguration. Yegorushka is engaged upon an entry into captivity which is also an escape. Many people like to think that great artists must be great innovators – even Chekhov, who refused ...”

“... description of that moment of biographical contact carries an echo of Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ (‘I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark/Suddenly, his expression in a glass’). In The Merchant of Prato she borrows a more challenging metaphor. The book’s opening words – epigraphic if not actually placed as an epigraph – are by ...”

“... a professor troll, whom he observed through a keyhole eating his own wife. The Troll was eating a lady. Poor girl, she was tightly clutched to its breast by those rudimentary arms, with her head on a level with its mouth. She was dressed in a nightdress which had crumpled up under her armpits, so that she was a pitiful naked offering, like a classical picture ...”

“... why Wilson allowed him to do so. Present in these pages, for example, is the tale of the Beautiful Lady In Red (though, unlike most of the others, not very well told). This concerns a state ball in the capital of Brazil, where our hero, as Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, is the guest of honour. When the orchestra strikes up a ...”

“... the wife of Gilbert de Préville Colvile and of Tom, the fourth Baron Delamere. Gwladys, Lady Delamere (Tom’s stepmother, wife of the third Baron, who broke the news to Broughton that ‘Joss is wildly in love with Diana’). Plus a number of walk-on, climb-on or lie-down roles for assorted ex-Etonian or Brigade of Guards adulterers, big-game ...”

“... Gilroy took temporary jobs, as a filing clerk in a mail-order sweatshop and as a uniformed maid to Lady Anne (no surname given), a determined supporter of the empire. Often sympathetic in her descriptions of others, particularly women and children, Gilroy can also be unsparing. She notes that Hilda, the ruthless manageress of the sweatshop, keeps a special ...”

“... was the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, a cousin of Lord David Cecil, et cetera, and became a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret – the next best thing, perhaps, to Betjeman bagging a royal. His relationship with Cavendish was clearly one of the most important in his life, but the reader is left to infer from Hillier’s silences, or to guess from the ...”

“... out a name. In fact, I’m that young man with thick spectacles in the library. I flirt with a lady who wears them too and has an interest in creative writing. She’s all in white and her smile reveals a row of white teeth over which she has stuck cellophane like a child. I see the house where we’ll spend our remaining years: our faces redden in the ...”

“... like that accent. Please don’t come slouching near my bed again.’ So, real cool, I growled, ‘Lady, no way you’ll walk right over me.’ Dead on. I chucked her then. The Rosetta Stone We were real good and got to share a desk that smelt like the head’s Bible when I lifted up its lid and nicked a sharp HB from Eileen’s leather pouch, knowing that she ...”

“... birth simultaneously in the same two-roomed cabin). Zadel was a journalist who had hung out at Lady Wilde’s literary salon in London and was so close to Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she signed letters to her ‘Mother’. She also appears to have been a medium, which talent she passed on to her second daughter-in-law (the ‘other woman’). When ...”

“... I did, when taking up Part of his Gown to fan himself with; and acting in Character of a prudish Lady, he said: ‘Well, I don’t know what to think; Women may be honest that do such things, but for my Part I never could bear to touch any Man’s Flesh – except my Husband’s, whom perhaps,’ says he, ‘she wish’d at the Devil.’ Swift’s fleshly ...”