“... have been told about Willy’s fauve period and partial taming, in spite of the relish with which Lady Walton speaks of her husband’s fondness for his physiotherapist; and her chief virtue, according to him, was her unmusicality, so judicious accounts of his work cannot be looked for here. This does not prevent her from dropping delicious apercus about ...”

“... encountered. Some months later, I saw a documentary made on the day of the funeral, in which a bag lady was asked for her opinion on the death of the Princess of Wales: ‘Oh, she’s died has she? I wondered why there were so many people about.’ Ten years on, with so many more screens and pages clogged with celebrity, and the broadsheets gone overtly ...”

“... by Gabriel’s visit. No such anxieties seem ever to have afflicted Jacky Newcomb, ‘the Angel Lady’, who writes a number of columns in the mystical press, teaches at Colin Fry’s International College of Spiritual Science and Healing in Ramsbergsgarden, Sweden, runs www.angellady.co.uk, and has now written a book, An Angel Treasury: A Celestial ...”

“... than France to realise that the term ‘graphic’ in front of novel is not (in the manner of ‘lady novelist’) diminishing, that it might actually signal a double dose of imagination. The speech that snaps out of these drawings (‘snog Ryan … bet you … he’d be like a donkey eating an apple …’) makes the dialogue of much contemporary drama look ...”

“... with towers and medieval houses, and then there is always the spring: I like to wait for my late lady friend whenever the ice on the Danube is breaking. He carries the lady’s fur on his arm. He has already waited for 17 minutes, eyeing the five or six plain girls who are also waiting. So sad that this is only a Hungarian ...”

“... his brother sink thankfully onto the vacated thrones and take off their shoes and poor pregnant Lady Townsend is at last permitted to sit down. In the first version of the script I wanted to emphasise the unbuttoning that occurred once the King and Queen left the room by having Fitzroy unexpectedly return; the court is suddenly stunned back into silence and ...”

“... weaves and multiplies Exceeding pleasure out of extreme pain. ‘Dolores’, a prayer to ‘Our Lady of Pain,’ pleads: O lips full of lust and of laughter, Curled snakes that are fed from my breast, Bite hard, lest remembrance come after And press with new lips where you pressed. Verse was meant to hurt. The ballads collected in O’Gorman’s edition ...”

“... devil always has an imp or two in every house; and my imps are getting lively. The good lady, the dear, kind lady, the sweet, excellent lady, Nemesis, whom alone I adore, has fixed her wooden eye upon me. I fall prone; spare me, Mother Nemesis!’ Fanny was clearly an amazing ...”

“... a curious fashion spearheaded in London between 1793 and 1794 by the second of her case studies, Lady Charlotte Campbell, another veteran of Naples. Campbell introduced a vogue for wearing ‘belly pads’, a stuffed linen bag worn under the dress to create the appearance of a fuller, rounded stomach. The spectacularly short-lived nature of this fashion is ...”

“... respectable reviews, and he was taken up by critics like Edmund Gosse, literary hostesses like Lady St Helier, and grandes dames like Violet Hunt, a former mistress of H.G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford. He now established himself as a prolific writer of novels, short stories and plays, and perfected his public persona: polite but cynical, with a streak of ...”

“... there by his extremely wealthy and successful cousin Simon Taylor. Taylor, according to Lady Nugent, the governor’s wife, ‘had a numerous family, some almost on every one of his estates’. Tailyour began a relationship with an enslaved woman, Polly, born Mary Graham, who was described as ‘mulatto’ on the baptismal certificates of her and ...”

“... at the moment of correct focus (this is what is the most amusing to calculate) … She is the lady in all her get-up, very fashionable, very ridiculous … or very pretty, who knows? Far off, among the walkers, she stands out like a golden pheasant in a henhouse. She approaches … I’m shy, trembling a little. Twenty metres … ten metres … eight ...”

“... stock quotation incomprehensibly appended as a caption. On page 127 we discover Pickwick’s old lady confronting the fat boy who wants to make her flesh creep. The old lady is drawn as Mrs Thatcher. The fat boy has the word ‘Voters’ emblazoned on his back. Why? What’s the point? Where’s the pith? Bernard Partridge ...”

“... speech; and it is worth reminding ourselves that ‘phonetic spelling’, as used by Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and elsewhere (‘Appen yer’d better ’ave this key, an’ Ah min fend for t’bods some other road,’ etc) is a thoroughly dubious, and basically quite illogical device. For, whether or not it is correct to call such spelling ...”

“... mistress. The late Colonel Ingham, the greatest collector of Boswelliana, used to say that Lady Talbot of Malahide threw them on the fire in 1927 because they were too disgusting, but that he had read them first: they disclosed that Thérèse told Boswell he was a rotten, inconsiderate lover and, much to his discomfort, tried to teach him better ...”