“... the same collection, about ‘An artist waiting in a country house’. The artist waits to see the lady, who had asked to see the man who painted the pictures. But he is kept waiting, as ‘minutes passed, unlived ... cinematic’, glimpsing the lady’s husband kissing her cheek outside the house. The ...”

“... in which Chaplin had lived in Kennington, and Sir Ralph Richardson had just unveiled it, an old lady stopped and muttered within my hearing: ‘They’ve got the wrong house.’ They had indeed. David Robinson points out that the Chaplin family lived next door. Many specialists have tended to doubt the veracity of Chaplin’s autobiography, claiming that ...”

“... craziness,’ Macgregor says. ‘Just think about it. Here we are in Kentish Town. A lady with the backing of the local newspaper wants a cancer drug, which she may need, but which costs £100,000. So we give it and treat her as well as we can. Then a lady in Tower Hamlets is turned down for the drug, because ...”

“... with his ‘asinine high-pitched Bloomsbury voice’. One after another the nobs are scarified: Lady Diana Cooper, around whom ‘men of all ages flocked ... like gulls round a council tip,’ and who herself had ‘a talent for scavenging that would have done credit to a coyote’, Lady Mosley, Daphne Rae, Beatrice ...”

“... is unclear, and their identity is uncertain. But their names are usually given as George and Lady Mary Hamilton. The daughter appears to have been Sophia St John Hamilton. Just then Foscolo was brushing up his English by reading Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, which he later translated into Italian. The Hamiltons’ dashing and accommodating ...”

“... thirteenth century. This puts a new complexion on the fairy: not the misty bath-look of a country lady mysteriously slim, but the pale brown of a mysteriously plump, veiled woman of Damascus, in perpetual afternoon sewing, secluded from the dusty city. We wonder how her needlework found its way to this wall. In the coarse hands of some crusader? Did he come ...”

“... this seriously. I am always taking it seriously out to the wheelie bin and dropping in the white lady in the grey underhose who as we speak is speeding southwards in a sealed railway compartment. Perhaps that is poetry? No, it’s love. Can you recall why you began to write? I was locked in a toilet with a jackdaw and a notebook and my mother was pounding on ...”

“... so that we saw the great mass of upturned faces at one moment and at the next were peering through Lady Diana’s veil. Was she nervous today? Might we see a tear? Does the camera extend our perception? Or does it, by seeing what our naked eye can never see, confuse our relationship with the thing we look at? Is it the camera or our own fantasies about royalty ...”

“... supply of aunts and uncles. Nothing could have done more to convince us that the formidable Lady Waters will play a decisive role in the lives of the protagonists of To the North (1932) than the genealogical flourish with which she is introduced: ‘Lady Waters had had no children by either marriage. Her first had ...”

“... Charles Chaplin. Orson’s view was that he had first thought of the comedy about the French lady-killer Landru, a modern Bluebeard, which in 1947 became Monsieur Verdoux. He had already described its essence in 1941: There is one tableau, and it is the key to the whole film. There is Chaplin, dapper and blithe, clipping the hedges, making his hands and ...”

“... in posies for readers to sniff and to pluck. Consider this delicious morsel of anonymity, ‘On a Lady Sleeping’, plucked by Peter Davidson from BL MS Add. 25,707: Calmely as the mornings soft teares shedd Upon some rose or Violet bedd May your slumbers fall upon you All your thoughts sit easy on you Gently rocking heart and eyes With their tuneful ...”

“... says, the old Ascendancy in Ireland. Elsewhere Yeats borrows a phrase from the poem to talk about Lady Gregory, who is said to be ‘indifferent to praise or blame’, a quality attributed to the law that was one of the pretty toys ‘we’ had when young. But then their youth in this sense goes back a while, at least to the 18th century, as Foster ...”

“... but explicit and cynical, and went on about how he would have been ashamed to leave a young lady in the virgin state he found her; and instead of the magic of those ages long ago in which his lovers fled away into the storm, he announced that in the concluding lines of the poem he wished to ‘leave on the reader a sense of pettish ...”

“... his ‘saving grace of coarseness’ by introducing female characters who bend or break the rules (Lady Mason in Orley Farm, Lady Glencora in the Palliser sequence, Lizzie Eustace in The Eustace Diamonds, Mrs Hurtle in The Way We Live Now), and male ones who enjoy gambling or field sports and whose talk is ribald, even lewd ...”

“... the timing of its publication – between the scandals of Ulysses in 1922 and the appearance of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Well of Loneliness in 1928 – meant that My First Thirty Years inevitably attracted the attention of censors in Britain and America. In November 1925 Janet Flanner’s Paris dispatch for the New Yorker discussed the brouhaha ...”