“... 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 ...”

“... watch, he is pardoned and not hanged by the neck for the murder he didn’t commit. The inevitable Lady Mary exhibits her spoiled nature and then learns her lesson several times in each season, and the irredeemably wicked footman and his spiteful lady’s maid accomplice get their comeuppance and revert to type so frequently ...”

“... schools in the US, including Vassar and Sarah Lawrence, meanwhile, began to admit men, as did Lady Margaret Hall and St Anne’s in Oxford, and Girton in Cambridge. In an extraordinarily short space of time, coeducation had ceased to be a distant possibility and was in widespread operation. One obvious explanation for the speed with which single-sex ...”

“... was sent to work as a servant, to teach her humility, but rebelled on the grounds that she was a lady. After many setbacks Maynard wondered whether the girl suffered from ‘moral idiocy’, blameable perhaps on that Italian streak in her parentage. Sent to an orphan-training school, Effie was found in bed teaching other girls ‘filthy and disgusting ...”

“... by domestic objects. Sometimes they are reading, as in her two paintings of the early 1910s, A Lady Reading and Girl Reading at the Window (Quinn’s first acquisition). The lady has a face like ‘a vierge of Dürer’, John said; the girl has John’s own face. Sometimes her women hold a piece of sewing, or a cat. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as Oban. It’s here that we’re introduced to the sopranos of the fifth-year choir of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour’s School for Girls: the naturally aristocratic Fionnula (the Cooler); Orla, who is dying of Hodgkin’s disease and has undergone the traumas of radiotherapy and Lourdes; Chell, who adores animals; Manda, who lives with her father some ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the knighthood, the Order of Merit, the honorary degrees faithfully chronicled on the title-pages (Lady Frazer would surely have pounced on any omission). It all seems like a copious burial hoard among which – somewhere – Frazer himself unobtrusively lies. Mr Ackerman has set himself the task of excavation. The site is relatively untouched; the only ...”