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“... 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 ...”

“... make themselves fully as ridiculous as Mrs Trimmer, and are offended even more easily. One good lady, ‘active in several American feminist groups’, has been through children’s dictionaries: ‘two solid days of reading – filled with eyestrain, boredom and outrage’. She finds that John is able to touch his toes, while Ann is not able: John is at ...”

“... few pages, when she loses her point and joins all the rest of us in our all too real banality. The Lady of Shalott took drastic measures in terms of art when the curse of living came upon her. Lolita survives her enchanting nymphetude, and for a while is as interesting as a dull little wife as she was when presenting Humbert Humbert with his destiny. Brookner ...”

“... She was addicted to childish and ill-judged ‘larks’, which ranged from dressing up as an old lady to do research at a psychiatrist’s to attending a Mosley rally in 1936 in the hope of turning the crowd against him. She was also a psychopath behind the wheel of a car, adding to the perils of the Blitz by volunteering to drive an ambulance. To counter ...”

“... no generic difference worth the name between, say, The House of Seven Gables and The Portrait of a Lady, or for that matter between Daphnis and Chloe and Ulysses. James admitted that there was no definite boundary between novel and romance, but he knew that in such extreme cases there was no problem telling one from the other. Of course you can argue that ...”

“... in sex is waning, although substitutes in the form of various massages are available on the NHS. Lady Margaret Hall is the massage centre for Oxford, and in Oxford lives the diarist-narrator Theo Faron, cousin and boyhood friend of the Warden and teacher of history (‘the least rewarding discipline for a dying species’) to the last generation born, the ...”

“... Christian, of sorts. In ‘A Letter from Brooklyn’, from the collection In a Green Night, an old lady writes to the poem’s narrator, ‘in a spidery style,/Each character trembling’, about his dead father and about her confidence in the father’s place in heaven: ‘So this old lady writes,’ the poem ends, echoing ...”

“... the Romantics. It contains multitudes, most famously the late 14th-century tapestry cycle of the Lady and the Unicorn, but it is the site itself, a medieval house built among the ruins of a Roman bath complex, the barely credible survival of two thousand years of use and reuse, that gives it its peculiar resonance. A speeded-up film of Cluny’s history ...”