“... too,’ he says, shoving his face into hers and taking a handful of eyeliners. Suddenly the little lady erupts. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘I’m a policewoman,’ and she brandishes her identification in his face as they do in police series. ‘You’re nicked.’ She isn’t exactly an intimidating figure and he’s practically out of the shop now anyway but ...”

“... on that day, she sometimes recited a mysterious poem called ‘Lasca’ about a spirited young lady in Texas who ‘sighed for a canter after the cattle’. A crack of the whip like a shot in a battle With the green below and the blue above And dash and danger and life and love. The spirited young lady came from East ...”

“... this is what can happen to great houses with ambiguous legacies.The copper beech tree on which Lady Gregory’s guests carved their names is close by. You can just make out some of the initials: GBS, SOC, WBY, JBY, AE. ‘All/That comes of the best knit to the best,’ Yeats wrote in ‘Upon a House Shaken by Land Agitation’. ...”

“... vile.’ More confident women have their expectations disappointed – like the liberal-minded old lady who allows hippies to swim in her lake and, as a result, returns from her morning swim naked and disconsolate, after an unfortunate experience. ‘Christ, Mother!’ says her son, throwing her a tablecloth. Her daughter-in-law ‘responds to the story’ in ...”

“... He seems to me to uplift, to be in a comic sense ‘too good for this life’, like the desecrated lady on the poster advertisement for Sunny Prestatyn. Even his fear of death can calm and satisfy ours. (After ‘Aubade’, he had a letter from a lady of 72 ‘saying she felt as I did once but now doesn’t mind’.) But, as ...”

“... are shits, but that I really hate left-wing people. I fell in love with Nell Dunn, whose mother. Lady Mary Campbell ... lived in the Ritz ... Nell was wearing jeans, a Peace For Me top under an Afghan waistcoat, her fine blonde hair tied up with luminous beads. I was carrying her Moroccan-carpet shoulderbag stocked with leaflets advertising a poetry-and-jazz ...”

“... spite on the part of the Muse to persuade Ms Benkovitz that, if someone has the name and title Lady Henrietta Pelham, you can save time when she is next mentioned by calling her Lady Pelham. To students of Firbank Ms Benkovitz has managed to make herself, despite everything, indispensable: by buying several of his ...”

“... stand, leaving them lumbered with such dreadful and socially damaging errors as the assertion that Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a great work of literature and a helpful guide to sex-life. There have been too many such mistakes, and a guess, now, is that embarrassment is a response that should be received respectfully – if not Nature’s Guide to Bad ...”

“... ignored the warning chorus of Schonfields, Shankses and Croslands. BSA profits supported Lady Docker. ‘British Achievements Speak for Britain,’ said the hoardings, with pictures of Shipbuilding, Steel, Nuclear Power, Cars, Aircraft and everything else that was soon to go so wrong, so disastrously. Together we walked backwards into decline. Who ...”

“... and accepted self, the inherited and environmentally-conditioned personality of a ‘great lady’ on the eastern seaboard of America, destined to follow her mother in being a gracious hostess, golfer, lady bountiful, social arbiter, benefactor of hospitals and causes. She seems to have had the right self for the ...”

“... made John Jasper more in love with Edwin than he is with Rosa. I also much enjoyed the essay on Lady Morgan, known as ‘Glorvina’ and author of The Wild Irish Girl (the title is ironic – the girl was an animated and cultivated bluestocking), and its guess that Jane Austen, who thought poorly of the novel, may have had Glorvina in mind when she created ...”

“... of a nonsense joke she had made a couple of months earlier in a gossipy letter to her sister: ‘Lady Sondes is an impudent Woman to come back into her old Neighbourhood again; I suppose she pretends never to have married before – & wonders how her Father & Mother came to have her christen’d Lady Sondes.’ The fact ...”

“... are not fused, imaginatively or stylistically. Victor Grant, the narrator of Confessions of a Lady-Killer, is deserted by his wife after feminist friends raise her consciousness. He decides, reasonably enough, to murder the ringleaders in revenge. The early sections of the novel contain some lively satire against the wilder excesses of contemporary ...”

“... was that of the Virgin Mary. At Jaen in 1430, for example, four people saw the Virgin as a tall lady in white: ‘From this lady issued so much brightness that she shone as the sun shines.’ At Sant Aniol, near Girona, she appeared as ‘a beautiful, elegant woman dressed in white’. At Pinos, near Lleida, in 1507, a ...”

“... when was he anything else? He has made a habit of being 60; he has made a profession of it. Like Lady Dumbleton, he has been 60 for the last 25 years. On his own admission there was never a boy Larkin; no young lad Philip, let alone Phil, ever. Besides, why a book? He must be fed up at the sight of books. It’s books, books, books every day of his life, and ...”