“... 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 to scramble into a scene of military action and glory. We are not told, however, why all Lady Randolph’s efforts to use her influence failed, though a letter published in one of the 1967 companion volumes gives the clue to this. With other junior officers of the Fourth Hussars Winston had been involved in an effort to prevent a newly posted Second ...”

“... a tape of The Importance of Being Earnest. He himself took the part of Algernon, while the role of Lady Bracknell was hogged by a very distinguished British foreign correspondent of what might be called the old school. A large sepia photograph of the Führer frowned from a mantel. Later in the week, we were absorbing a pre-lunch cocktail when my new chum said ...”

“... the funds for Katherine, self-exiled in Spain, one ‘bolter’ subsidising another. The old lady takes Katherine for a holiday in Portugal: the mother seems very conscious of herself as being a lady among the locals, a settler among the natives. She had been somewhat ‘alienated’ from her neighbours in her native ...”

“... writes Robinson, ‘are the stories I have heard, and they are much the same as those Lady Gregory collected here in 1898.’ The work of art, seen first from an aeroplane, the recently-discovered but ancient fossil, the legendary sea-horse and its connection with Lady Gregory’s earlier foray to the ...”

“... production-line worker, and a character from classic fiction – Prince Genji, hero of the Lady Murasaki’s Tale. Here they are, then, four representative specimens of Nipponymity, contemplating typical aspects of Britishness and discovering all manner of links and parallels between the two island cultures – some of them amusingly absurd, some both ...”

“... to be thrown back on the services of an almost imbecile elderly creature, the companion of a lady in reduced circumstances, to whom he was referred by his hotel, and whom he later met at a local church service. What was Butler doing in church? Foreign ones counted as tourism, and besides he was always curious to find out what the enemy were up to, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his shirt in for the rest of her life, and soon found herself in the unenviable position of the lady in De Quincey’s anecdote about the Reverend Coleridge (Coleridge’s dad) who, tucking his shirt in at a dinner party, discovered that he had been ‘most laboriously stowing away, into the capacious receptacles of his own habiliments, the snowy folds of a ...”

“... anecdotally through the poem, Lord Northcliffe crazy, Lenin in the process of being mummified, Lady Conan Doyle getting in touch with her dead husband, Haile Selassie in exile, his gas bill unpaid. Stalin quizzes Pasternak on the telephone about Mandelstam, Pasternak refuses to sign the letter commiserating with Stalin on his wife’s suicide, Churchill ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”