“... her nectary. * The dead jack-rabbit has dried flat as wood, like a Texas cricket bat. * I find Our Lady of Guadalupe out there, watching through the wire. * Only the eagle moves in this heat, shimmering in the blue thermals. * Covering my tracks I have tied mesquite branches to the horse’s tail. * These are just fences and the fences are burning. This is ...”

“... can’t be so far away.’ Bring me that fellow called Hay. Uncork a bottle of smoke. Help the old lady out of the bush. Hee haw, when the cart has passed and straws still glint on some snags in the hedge. Close your eyes and make a mum with your mouth shut. Just so. Now look. The stanza is a born dancer, out on the green. Tongs and bones in your good ear. The ...”

“... She had no real part in his plot and outside it is irritatingly redundant. Meanwhile the leading lady of the film falls ‘commercially but genuinely in love with Tom’. The film having been successfully finished, he thinks up another, set in Roman Britain, with the same leading lady and even a small part for the tiresome ...”

“... her sons Sikander (the Indian for Alexander) and Chotta; they both become soldiers. The other lady calls hers Sanjay, and he becomes a poet – and the monkey with the typewriter in his next incarnation. This crude synopsis of a tiny part of the story gives an idea of its complication and improbability, but none of its fascination, charm, and sheer ...”

“... it to England. The mummy’s gilded mask was donated to the British Museum; the coffin went to Lady Susan Meux for her private museum of Egyptian artefacts at Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire. She died in 1911, leaving her collection to the British Museum, but they didn’t want it: it was a condition of her bequest that it be kept together rather than ...”

“... Cary, the other in a scribal hand. The second has been meticulously corrected from the first by Lady Rochester, who does not however correct the ascription of three stanzas of the poem to ‘Dux Bucks’ and three more to ‘Fleetwood Shepherd’. Harold Love did not know of these important manuscripts, and seems not to have recognised ...”

“... 1954, was about a careless dry cleaner, and began the dispatches from ‘a rather long-winded lady’ whom the New Yorker heard from ‘occasionally’. Introducing 47 of these pieces for a collection published in 1969, Brennan gave a sketch of her alter ego. She ‘thinks the best view of the city is the one you get from the bar that is on top of the ...”

“... Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh on the subject:I used to masturbate whenever I thought about Lady Jane Grey so of course I thought about her constantly and even executed a fine watercolour of her on the scaffold, which my mother still has, framed, and in which Lady Jane and her ladies-in-waiting all wear watches ...”

“... Plumb’s Walpole (a grand opera, complete with overture, but still lacking its third act); Lady Longford’s Wellington (her pen as mighty as his sword); Gash’s Peel (a peerless study of a baronet); Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (one patrician beguilingly evoking another); Blake’s Disraeli (champagne and epigrams all the way); and Marquand’s ...”

“... Sister Dew, good-hearted parish helper, is the equivalent of Mrs Jennings or Miss Bates. The mean Lady (Muriel) Selvedge, who comes to open the Church bazaar and lunches en route near Victoria for 3s 9d, might be based on the entrepreneurial Lady Denham in Sanditon. Ianthe’s aunt, Bertha, married to the rector of a ...”

“... disapproval, the boy threw himself into the school plays at Clifton, excelling in female parts. As Lady Mary Lasenby in J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, the 15-year-old Michael wept plausible womanly tears. As the social-climbing Mrs Hardcastle in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer he proved he could do comedy. But it was his ...”

“... Mitford had not had the luxury of a school education, her parents – Lord and Lady Redesdale – not thinking it worth the trouble and expense for girls. But she shared most of Romilly’s enthusiasms and hatreds. In particular, unlike her sisters Diana and Unity, who were busy falling in love with both Fascism and Fascists (Oswald Mosley ...”

“... blind, deaf etc. Fish rejoices at the point in Comus (actually a later textual addition) where the Lady, after a long passage of robust reasoning on behalf of virtue, tells the threatening wood-demon that she will argue with him no longer. For Fish’s Milton the important thing is never to assess the argument proffered but always to identify the party to ...”

“... as if he had not altered his position, but he thought it better not to worry the kind old lady; so he smiled gently when she broke bits of toasted bread into the broth with all the bustle befitting so solemn a preparation.’What matters most, in the larger scheme of things, is that Oliver should have recovered a memory of the mother he barely ...”

“... Imminent Global Sapphic Takeover, that is. Aggressive, competitive, exorbitantly heterosexual Poet Lady with long flowing hair. Thirty years later, one of the Reigning Poetry Divas of Our Time. Poet Lady [in great excitement, to the group]: Hey, guys, you’ll never believe the weird gossip I just heard! [Everyone smiles and ...”