“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like Spatter, Lady Know-All and Mr Varnish assail the gormless hero until he drops dead of despair; and Sarah Scott’s thoroughly demoralising Millenium Hall (1762), on the supposed consolations of living in a grim all-female community where one does nothing but sew all day ...”

“... Old War’, is the story of the battle; the second and longest of the three, ‘A Great Lady’, traces Gjorg and Vladan’s path in the following weeks. Separated in the commotion of battle, the clamour of cross and crescent, they are in due course gratefully reunited. Vladan (the Serb) has thrown away his gousla, Gjorg (the Albanian) has kept his ...”

“... Sir Edward Cassel, Edward VII’s crony and investment tipster; the man who, when asked by a lady what he thought of her lapis lazuli necklace, reputedly said: ‘Very pretty stuff. I’ve got a room made of it.’ Thorold is never too occupied with population shifts and infillings to overlook the foibles of the times. He reminds us of the etiquette of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shacks. A young girl picking flowers stumbles on the body of a lynched man. An old black lady wanders into a segregated church and is bustled away by the congregation, who project onto her dazed, innocent face all their own mean and multiple fears. Poor blacks move North, become Muslims, and return as tourists to their past; others stay at home and ...”

“... have plenty of soap, but the British Council didn’t tell us to bring water,’ I remark to a lady from Poznan. ‘Ah, Poland will always surprise you,’ she replies with a smile. ‘By the way,’ I say, ‘would you like some soap?’ The moment seems opportune, though the offer, when I hear myself saying it, lacks finesse. She accepts with charming ...”

“... himself of the body of an atheistic scientist, Weston, in order to prosecute his temptation of the Lady. Happily, Ransom manages to bash in the face of this equivocal being with a stone and hurl him into a lake of fire. So all is well on Perelandra. Even when handling a theme as momentous as this, it seems, Lewis can rely predominantly upon his visual ...”

“... debated ever since his old admirers on the American Left took offence at the hit musical of 1941, Lady in the Dark. Recently, the argument has developed some entertaining new twists: while certain sections of the Left are finding hitherto unsuspected merit in the Weill who was once stigmatised as ‘commercial’, refugees from the crumbling fortresses of ...”

“... her. (She was memorably fierce in reviewing Susan Brownmiller’s book on rape: ‘She is not a lady and she is a very bad writer.’) Her relationship with Lowell, and with his work and her own, embodies something paradoxical in that mid-century moment, for a certain kind of intellectual woman. On the one hand, she expresses contempt for the conventions of ...”