“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with respectable young women including such ‘notable’ aristocratic beauties as the sisters Lady Violet and Lady Diana Manners, around whom a cloud of eligible beaux constantly buzzed. Carrington’s own family was not grand. Her father had been a civil engineer in India and married late when he retired to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... flicks past her at the counter and a splash of Sincere coffee fills her cup – Ray is all yours lady! No date no wait no fate to contemplate! he grins. Contour of a person so different from what you can get into bits of speech. His calf muscles for instance were huge. Like a ballet dancer’s. She thought about it walking beside him. Or a bicycle ...”