“... of the fictional structure, this woman becomes, in the book, Lena von Pussel, a German lady intimate with Elgar in distant days when they were both aspiring musicians, but now, at the time of the narrative, resident in Brazil. We are encouraged to believe that she is the hidden subject of the 13th Enigma Variation, and that consequently the letters ...”

“... again not just on his own testimony) to have evolved quite a relationship with the First Lady. It had, indeed, been Hillary’s idea to get Morris back on the team after Clinton’s reverse in Arkansas in 1979. She it was who snatched up the phone and made that cheap pager vibrate its thrilling summons. ‘Bill needs you right now,’ she breathed. I ...”

“... Even old loyalties turned a bit sceptical. In her Memories of George Meredith one of his fans, Lady Butcher, recalled how he had thrilled her with his first inspiration for One of Our Conquerors, as they walked together on Box Hill. As I listened to his wonderful voice telling of the tragic history of Nathalie and the dawning wonder of Nesta, I thought it ...”

“... words in Greek script; he was, with this degree of concealment, named Dung or Filth or Poofy. Lady Penelope commented affectionately on her lover’s green teeth and his smell. He irritated her parents by ostentatiously wearing a made-up white tie, which he snapped back and forth on its elastic. After many vicissitudes there was a secret marriage, and ...”

“... with judicious exposition; and it assembles its material under a number of pungent headings – ‘Lady Novelists and Honorary Men’, ‘The Sex War’, and so on. This author is knowledgable and persuasive on the topic of the outlet literature affords certain perennial aversions: we have Ivy Compton Burnett, for example, ‘with her attacks upon male ...”

“... but also Irish and proud of it. Yet Yeats declined to think of himself as an Irish painter. Lady Gregory wanted him for her renaissance (to a considerable extent an Anglo-Irish affair). His not altogether helpful champion, Thomas MacGreevy, loudly claimed him for Ireland, but Samuel Beckett, deploring this as he deplored attempts to exaggerate his own ...”

“... to do that, but finally agrees to place the child in Paley’s lap. A white man says to her: ‘Lady, I wouldn’t of touched that thing with a meat hook.’ Paley loves America, and was brought up to celebrate its difference from dark old pogrom-stained Europe. But it is full of terrible remembrances for her, and that is precisely what she calls this ...”

“... they will get lucky – that tonight, unlike all the other nights, they will chance upon a true ‘lady of pleasure’: a healthy whore who likes it, and who quite likes them. The fantasy of purchasable and yet genuine (just for you) sexual compliance has brutally deep roots. As to the others who ‘go back for more’ – well, in many cases, Carol and Sharon ...”

“... to be the best piece in The Pangs of Love, a story called ‘The Easter Lilies’, a dotty old lady resents buying Easter flowers when the things grow wild in Malta. Sacrificing custom regulations to common sense, she has a bunch sent over. The rich ungrateful bitch acting as courier drops her pearls in the bouquet. The old ...”

“... Polish literary history falls in and has to be rewritten. Hence too, more famously, his essay on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, proving with precise, lawyerly argument what some had already half-suspected: that the seventh erotic encounter between Mellors and Lady Chatterley, where the gamekeeper ‘burns out the shame in ...”

“... If All Those Tomorrows follows the trail of an uncontrollable id, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady is the memoir of a serenely self-aware ego. Florence King grew up in an obsessively obstetrical atmosphere, but was encouraged to rebel by her drily intellectual father. Traditional Virginian femininity, she concluded at a relatively tender age, meant ...”

“... account of Livia, the Emperor’s wife: this rehabilitation, he urges, should ‘rescue that great lady from the vile calumnies fathered on her grandson Claudius by the fecund imagination of the late Robert Graves, itself infected by the most scurrilous rumour-mongers of Ancient Rome’. Unfortunately, the great lady seems ...”

“... comes as a mopping-up operation covering the rest of his life. It does not rerun the ‘Lady Chatterley’ trial, about which he published a book, or deal at length with his favourite editor, Kingsley Martin, whose biography he wrote. There is no law against writing one’s life twice over, if there is good ore still to be delved, but it can mean ...”

“... Beaverbrook died the newspapers passed – with unfortunate results – to his formidable widow, Lady Beaverbrook, and to his son, Sir Max Aitken. The reader will have spotted that even in my fantasies I harboured no prissy ideas about editorial independence. My vision of owning a newspaper was that it would say what I wanted it to say about the great issues ...”

“... of the Mellor affair. The excuse offered by the People’s editor – that Mr Mellor had told his lady friend that their nocturnal encounters were making him too tired to write his speeches, and that this made the story a legitimate matter of public interest – is frankly ludicrous. If that were the case, it would not just be the right but the duty of every ...”