“... were aborted so soon: the Twins were active members of the Bethnal Green Conservative Association. Lady Mancroft, president of the Association at that time, recalls ‘a frightful row ... they attacked someone, threw him across the road through a shop window. The police were very close and the hospital managed to sew the chap’s ear back on.’ Geoffrey ...”

“... innocent. Here and in Bram Stoker, but in not too many other Dracula movies, he brings his undead lady companions a live baby for supper. What the movie suggests at its best is that we are in a world of the mind, and that a romantic reading of this ghastly myth is at least possible. What appear to be tricks are mostly contributions to this theme. We see pages ...”

“... to Desdemona, after she presses him to think of something nice to say about her: ‘O gentle lady, do not put me to’t,/For I am nothing if not critical.’ For all its forbidding pauselessness on the page, If Not Critical catches something of the movement of a speaking voice and the demands it makes on the listener. It is literary criticism ‘to the ...”

“... an illegitimate child, excruciatingly humiliating in her day. Virginia Woolf, another sharp-eyed lady, wrote that all West’s difficulty came from ‘the weals and scars left by the hoofmarks of Wells’. (She also had comments about dirty nails and so on; Rebecca, for her part, would not ‘have fed a dog’ from one of Vanessa Bell’s plates, and ...”

“... control the rate of inflation. Indeed, they hold the second of these much more strongly than the Lady herself did, while the first only encourages the worst habits of British businessmen. How long this historically bizarre policy can be followed is anyone’s guess. Much depends, presumably, on how easily we can continue to fund the huge current account ...”

“... of an architect of uncertain social origins and a German name perhaps strengthened her resolve. (Lady Edith soon became close to her son-in-law, who designed her a wonderful house, Homewood, on the Knebworth estate.) From the start, Emily was an outsider in her own home; when she was Lutyens’s fiancée, she began to sew their entwined initials on the bed ...”

“... eccentric judgments sound like received wisdom. In his account of Hoggart’s star turn in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial in 1960 – Penguin had been charged under the Obscene Publications Act for putting out an unexpurgated edition of Lawrence’s novel – Inglis dwells predictably on the Establishment snobbery personified by the prosecuting ...”

“... units of ghostly narrative seem to circulate endlessly – the body in the basement, the white lady, the hooded monk – just waiting for a suitable place to take up residence: often the same story concerning Anne Boleyn or the headless horseman or whoever will be found in various locations. And fiction constantly gives the ghost-seers new material. For ...”

“... start?”’) Fitzgerald also surely owed something to E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady appeared in Time and Tide in the 1930s and whose ‘Robert’ is similarly laconic, impassive and discouraging. This fairly benign fiction, created perhaps as much for herself as for her daughters, concealed the painful truth that Desmond drank too ...”

“... be underway in Sicily. The Italian papers gave a different version. According to them, an elderly lady had a passion for mice, which she kept as pets. Having reached the age of 83 and being sans everything, she was no longer able to tend or feed them. The mice spilled out onto the roof and plummeted down from it. La Repubblica carried a cartoon showing ...”

“... In twenty years,’ Lady Astor used to say of Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, ‘I’ve never known Philip to be wrong on foreign politics.’ Though Lothian himself thought much the same, it is, in fact, harder to think of an occasion when he was right. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the strongly anti-Nazi head of the Foreign Office in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an incurably superficial Johnny-Know-All ...”

“... found Master Cromwell leaning in the great window, with a primer in his hand, saying Our Lady Matins, which since had been a strange sight. He prayed not more earnestly than the tears distilled from his eyes; whom I bade goodmorrow. And with that I perceived the tears upon his cheeks.’ It is a supremely artful description, making it look for a ...”

“... state and its actors are mostly absent, replaced by charlatans and frauds who will fleece an old lady for all she’s worth. Alarmingly, many of her rogues have a history of work in care homes or hospitals. Her writing has been compared to that of Muriel Spark, Anita Brookner and Dahl, on the grounds that her approach to cruelty is placid, even-toned. It can ...”

“... Polish guys, but they said they already had enough and had a long way to walk home. An old black lady in a claret hat came round and picked up items here and there. ‘Very good here,’ she said. ‘Terrible to waste things just like this.’ ‘This is England now,’ I said to Alf, his face lighted somewhat ghoulishly under the lamp on his ...”

“... landlady, landlady’s daughter, hero, hero’s friend, jealous rival or enemy, vicar, elderly lady or aunt, practical joker (the influence of Kipling here), comedy foreigner, censorious neighbour, returning husband or foreigner, mysterious lodger. All, of course, were interchangeable, ready both to act and to be acted upon. Many years later, when I heard ...”