“... about his famous brother, the movie actor, and his famous stage-fall. Like these others, Munro’s lady is caught in her provincialism of soul; but she is at the same time caught in the act of trying to escape provincialism. Her boast is both a sign of ordinariness and a longing to throw off ordinariness. Writers like Munro and Pritchett see the managed ...”

“... to the police, should anyone wish to see them.) MacArthur selects protests arising from the Lady Chatterley trial and the cannabis laws, refreshing inclusions both, but he also includes criticism of the clothes women wear at the opera. The book’s strict chronology means that John Pilger’s ‘Year Zero’ is followed by a ‘protest’ by ...”

“... that Fenwick is a historical personage. Ever since L.C. Knights was so scathing about Bradley and Lady Macbeth’s children, every English Literature undergraduate has been wary of that trap. There are other discordances in Letwin’s book. Her belief, for instance, that gentlemen are as asexual as angels. Thus she can write, ‘in Lizzie Eustace, Trollope ...”

“... patently criminal types. Ellery Queen has certainly poisoned his wife, and Miss Marple is surely a lady who has achieved something outstandingly heinous in a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett. Turning from The Great Detectives to Critical Observations, one is almost tempted to suppose that with Mr Symons it must be as with Ellery Queen: two distinct personalities ...”

“... mid-1940s. Some indication of the scope of this political involvement has already been given in Lady Namier’s biography of her husband, published in 1971, but as the involvement had almost ceased by the time she met him, and as she did not draw on anything like the range of manuscript collections and official archives which Professor Rose has so ...”

“... to books they don’t actually read, juvenile equivalents to The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. My own research, however, admittedly based on a grotesquely small proportion of the pre-teen reading public, suggests that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach and Danny, Champion of the World are far from being mere ...”

“... nothing much can be wrong with it. After all, an institution which manages to upset Mr Tony Benn, Lady Falkender, Mr Michael Meacher, Mr Joe Haines, the editor of the Spectator and the sub-editors of the Daily Express cannot be all bad; and from there it is a small step to conclude that it must be all, or nearly all, good. The step is a dangerous ...”

“... headquarters in New York, and was taken in with an interpreter to see a youngish, whitish Chinese lady, who was the Deputy-Prime Minister of the Kirghizi Republic. After we had discussed her goats at home, the excellence of her walnuts, and the fact that her district grew the most tasty apricots in the world, she came to the point. Fourteen times, she told ...”

“... She was writing in the day of Wilson Knight and the L.C. Knights of ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’, and at a time when the Bradleyan method had fallen thoroughly out of fashion. But there is nothing wrong with Bradleyan fantasy, provided it is recognised as such, for it enormously increases our sense of the depth and complexity of the ...”

“... aghast at the antics of ‘Snow Snifters’. Much later, dining with pop stars in Cheyne Walk, Lady Diana Cooper would mention that, in her day, post-prandial cocaine was served in salt-cellars. Hoare’s wartime London is a stage across which a troupe of affluent, cosmopolitan hipsters parade their unorthodoxy: the artist, drug addict, bisexual and ...”

“... novel about magic in the new age of science. Real people, from Newton to Swift, Handel, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mrs Manley, mingled with imaginary ones, not least the eponymous narrator of the title him/herself, a time-traveller from a late-20th-century mental hospital who switches gender in the process. Acts of Mutiny is equally ...”

“... Bush is clearly the better man these days, even if he looks as clueless as the Channel 5 weather lady. The Blair/Bush press conference was revealing. The press, in this instance two members of the British press, laid into Bush, not like our boys here do. You could see the sneer starting to take shape in the corner of his mouth, but he’d left the smirk at ...”

“... her eyes (a variant has ‘it shows thee to me’). But Donne’s poem ends by fretting over his lady’s potential infidelities, and Ashbery generalises the scepticism, extending it even to our understanding of our language and ourselves. ‘What you see will be used against you,’ he writes – a kind of Miranda warning – in the new book’s ‘Partial ...”

“... and Eva Le Gallienne in the United States. Even the ageing superstar Sarah Bernhardt appeared in Lady from the Sea in 1906. Meanwhile another set of directors and actors turned to Ibsen for quite different reasons. The young Aurélien Lugné-Poe hated naturalism and devised a new theatrical idealism that revelled in high poetic meaning and rarefied ...”

“... place in the land of Catita, where Jackanapes flies with his tail in his mouth, to seek out a lady as white as snow and as red as blood?’ Jack is dead. The character who speaks to Eumenides here, and asks to be taken into his service, is the grateful ghost of a poor man for whose burial Eumenides, although a stranger and mere passer-by, had earlier and ...”