“... her name) stepped out as Desdemona on 8 December, the prologue leered:       I saw the Lady dressed! The woman plays today! Mistake me not; No man in gown, or page in petticoat; A woman to my knowledge, yet I can’t (If I should die) make affidavit on’t. Do you not twitter, gentlemen? Simon Verelst, Nell Gwyn (c. 1680) The First Actresses ...”

“... papers looking for anything I may have overlooked about Miss Shepherd prior to the filming of The Lady in the Van. I find some notes on Miss S.’s costume in the 1980s plus a few of her odder remarks. As I occasionally did I must have complained about the smell: ‘Well there are mice, I know that and they make for a cheesy smell, possibly.’I have builders ...”

“... means stammering, or lisping, or merely fiercely rapid stumbling speech, everyone did it, says Lady Hotspur, just to be like him. In Shakespeare’s hands, through Lady Hotspur’s desolate words, a dead history comes alive. The historical Hotspur has turned into a living and wholly human stutter.One simple way of ...”

“... ago. Voices of children ripple endlessly, endorsing new products. The lizard-god explodes. The lady on the next bar-stool but one didn’t seem to understand you when you spoke of ‘old dark house’ movies – she thought there must be an old dark house somewhere and you wanted to take her there. Still, my arrival flummoxed her, since it suggested you ...”

“... If his church recalls the characterisation of the C of E as the Tory Party on its knees, it is Our Lady of Chequers upon whom the genuflecting is bent. Her Government’s victory with the Poll Tax (‘Community Charge’ to the loyal Baker), or rather her securing the necessary Parliamentary majorities, occasions Mr Baker’s merriment and pleasure. Elsewhere ...”

“... and high definition of the first published version of The American (1877), or even Portrait of a Lady (1881), compared to the anxious blurs and redundancies of the revisions. In The American the new Henry James changes the clause ‘it was like a page torn out of a romance’ to ‘it was like a page torn out of some superannuated unreadable book.’ To ...”

“... during the Dadaist days, where Ball saw him as a kind of holy fool, akin to the Dancer of Our Lady, whose role Wigman had danced in a male persona at Ascona. Eisenstein, who tried to film Cendrars’s novel, Sutter’s Gold, was himself a devotee both of Dalcroze eurhythmics and of colour-sound correspondence. Kandinsky was deeply influenced by Madame ...”

“... all right and got straight back to his books. The latter incident ended up as a cartoon (one of Lady Frazer’s treasured possessions) showing a group of ‘savages’ dancing round a blazing cauldron in which Frazer sat calmly reading a book on folklore. There was more to this heroisation than newspaper gossip. Frazer himself, however unwillingly, became ...”

“... third-person fiction’. Inside the covers we’re told with confessional baldness that ‘the old lady’s publisher has asked for an autobiography. But the resistance is huge. The absorbing present creates interference, as well as the old lady’s lifelong prejudice against biographical criticism, called laundry-lists by ...”

“... as Surrey’s uncle Thomas discovered when he was imprisoned in 1536 after a rash engagement to Lady Margaret Douglas, who also had royal blood. Surrey was unimaginably grand, but was also not unjustly described by John Barlowe, Dean of Westbury as ‘the most foolish proud boy that is in England’. His actions often tread the dividing line between ...”

“... a tour in India when, resounding across his hotel dining-room, he heard the unmistakable tones of Lady Betjeman. Richards had an eager group of fifteen people while Penelope was struggling to secure the attention of forty middle-aged American women. She had contributed articles on Indian art to the AR in the 1930s, but with children, houses and for a while a ...”

“... to Mar-a-Lago and began quizzing his friends on which of his girlfriends would make the best First Lady. By now, Trump was telling the New York Times that if he ran for president, he’d win: ‘The working man loves me.’ His playboy reputation, he said, shouldn’t be an obstacle: ‘Actually, I think people like it. It’s a fantasy.’ He was single after ...”

“... quick infallible prose shows us how and why. They are the exact opposite of Mellors and Lady Chatterley. Nothing could be less portentous than Mr Noon. And Worthen is surely right in taking Mr Noon as the index of Lawrence’s true feelings and responses at the time, and in telling the reader his grounds for doing so. By the time of The Rainbow and ...”

“... a wonderful story about being taken around by Jack: I went to the command performance of My Fair Lady in London with him. We didn’t have to go through customs – the FBI took us right through, because Hoover was his buddy. And, because my great-grandfather was from the aristocracy, Jack started introducing me as ...”

“... what Cather called ‘love letters’ from young men struck by the September-May romance of A Lost Lady. And she lived, according to some posthumous critics, as a closeted homosexual. Cather had many potential reasons for forbidding publication of her letters. Willa Cather in New Hampshire in 1917. Reading them suggests a more general anxiety. ‘There ...”