“... pinned up on it, a pot of ivy and the sitter. The National Gallery’s picture by Liotard of a lady pouring chocolate comes closer to it: the room is modest, there is rush matting on the floor, on the wall there is one of those plain Dutch church interiors. It comes to you that when you can see a sitter’s feet – you can see both the baron’s and the ...”

“... clearly expected deference and devotion from his daughter, though he received neither. ‘The Oval Lady’, a story written around the same time as ‘The Debutante’, conjures up the atmosphere of paternal tyranny and filial insubordination. Its young heroine, Lucretia, likes to play with her rocking horse, Tartar, even though her father (‘the ...”

“... she had set herself of stiffening the Duce against his sea of troubles.’ Not every Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, it turns out, has fits of conscience and bad dreams. Claretta and Mussolini seem to have felt pretty sanguine about their own actions, only regretting the ways in which others let them down and prevented their plans from coming to fruition. ‘I am ...”

“... the actress Perdita, but was at this point in prison for debt – titled Elegiac Verses to a Young Lady, on the death of her brother who was slain at the late engagement at Boston.Robinson was one of many women who were published by Johnson and who enjoyed the intellectual freedom of his dining room. Unlike Paterson, who devoted only one of his pensées in ...”

“... of the curious crowd and the traffic jam.   All the wonderful thrills I have missed. A lady sat on the floor with her legs stretched out as our mothers used to relax in the old days. Though I can’t remember the actual words, she sang with a golden voice, the face radiating all the affection and fire a woman can give a man. She turned and twisted ...”

“... Alys Pearsall Smith, and to the woman who liberated him from the ruins of that first marriage, Lady Ottoline Morrell – must strike most readers as someone who, even in his early forties, was unequipped for adult emotional life. This volume, stout as it is, inevitably gives a fragmentary impression of Russell, even of Russell as a correspondent. Only a ...”

“... a late interview. But then what happens when this incompetent thief writes, as Genet does in Our Lady of the Flowers, in the manner of a handbook on how to get away with it? Stealing from open displays is done according to several methods, and each kind of display, perhaps, requires one method rather than another. For example, with one hand, one can pick up ...”

“... war service in Holland. We could re-title this book after Denis Johnson’s play, The old lady says ‘No!’ All the same, Matthieu Galey (perhaps faux-naif) does elicit a good deal of information with his mistakes and his provoking questions. He even tempts her, for a moment, into a touch of French snobbery: she admits she is glad she was named ...”

“... Freya suspected that, had Gertrude been alive when she arrived in Baghdad, the ‘Khatun’ (‘Lady of the Court’), as she was known, might not have been kind to her, notorious as she was for putting other women down. Like Freya herself, Gertrude admired the young men who administered, single-handed, large tracts of lawless territory. ‘They are ...”

“... Shortly after the defeat of Napoleon, the young Grand Duke Nicholas had come to England. Lady Charlotte Campbell found him ‘devilish handsome’, while others, less frivolously, thought that he might one day put Russia on the Western path of enlightenment. Alas, when Nicholas succeeded as tsar in 1825, he dashed liberal hopes, hanging the ...”

“... Edmund Wilkie is sceptical. You will think differently, he tells her, ‘when you decide to be a lady novelist, and get set to write a long novel by Proust out of George Eliot, and it won’t get up and walk.’ The author of The Virgin in the Garden was also 17 in 1953, but Frederica Potter is not A.S. Byatt – even if subsequent novels have shown her ...”

“... too much into an ancient object. As he remarked one day, ‘It was an excellent question of my lady Cotton, when Sir Robert Cotton was magnifying of a shoe, which was Mose’s or Noah’s, and wondering at the strange shape and fashion of it: But Mr Cotton, says she, are you sure it is a shoe?’ The 20th-century art historian Martin Kemp has spent his ...”

“... aims of Shakespeare’s language then your sense of which passages are to be valued also changes. Lady Macbeth’s speech of welcome to Duncan, for instance, is undeniably complex, and Samuel Johnson would not have liked it:                   All our service In every point twice done, and then done double, Were poor and single business to ...”

“... defaulted on their payments. A third sequence, the most famous, features the so-called ‘Bunny Lady’, a Flint widow who has resorted to selling rabbits for a living (‘pets or meat’), skinning one of these creatures as it hangs from a tree, getting it ready to be fried. None of these images is subtle. All are what Kael would call ‘cheap’. But on ...”

“... all the whimsicality of late Faulkner. The best two stories, from 1944 and 1950, deal with a rich lady buying a fur coat from a poor lady. It must have been clear to him around the time he read the New York Times on 16 November 1959 that, despite his gifts and his early start and his many friends, his literary legacy was ...”