“... the Third?’) can shift into a remembrance of names significant to the poet: ‘Where are the Lady Carolines and Franceses?’ Since incongruence is a fact of life (as well as of the poem), the seams between public and private kinds of experience are left visible. At the beginning of Canto V, a passing mention of ...”

“... Hero (1944), enjoyed consistent critical and commercial success. At least two of them, The Lady Eve (1941) and Sullivan’s Travels (1941), have since achieved classic status in accounts of Hollywood comedy.But there is something else that demands acknowledgment, something woven into the pell-mell seriality of a life in which career opportunities, like ...”

“... stoicism in the face of extreme hardship, should carry us safely through all the rest, from ‘Lady love your cunt’ (Suck, 1971) and ‘Seduction is a four-letter word’ (Playboy, 1973) to the harbour of ‘Resettlement, Ethiopia’, 1985 (unpublished). She was delivered up, she records, to those Calabrian people in 1967: ‘they made sure I always ...”

“... rested. It is fortunate, then, that he makes it clear thoughout this book that he admires the lady – indeed, he goes further and pays her the ultimate compliment of declaring that she is the politician most like him, since she puts country and conviction before party loyalties. Coming from Dr Death, this is of some interest. Moreover, he also makes it ...”

“... there is already a fin-de-siècle air about memoirs of the Thatcher era. It seems so long ago. The lady herself clutches on to a form of political existence more as a menace than a force. She rages, more in reported than direct speech, against developments in the European Community. She has a group of followers on the backbenches who continue to see her as a ...”

“... but a series of them. The narrator has just slept with his girlfriend’s sister; ‘a fresh old lady who had never had a bad thought in her life’ appears from down the stair. An old man is intent on confessing something terrible; there’s ‘a fuisty smell of shit which suggests this old bloke needs his bum wiped’. It transpires that at some point in ...”

“... hand and a sharp knife; there is something horrid in his own account of how he cured a noble lady of a drooping eyelid, she calling out while he operated, ‘You hurt me! you hurt me!’ he replying, ‘Remember lady, beauty! beauty!’; but it is hard to see that he was doing anything more than many a respectable but ...”

“... been argued that there may have been something a touch ambivalent about the Nazerene himself; no lady-killer, at any rate. Tom emphatically did not get on with either his father or his mother, but he has and had that in common with many docile and patriotic heterosexuals. Moreover, as anyone with any Foreign Office or SIS experience will tell you, there were ...”

“... once have been, an introduction to Winnie Mandela – who sat silently by – but to a frail old lady of 86, the widow of the former ANC leader and Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Chief Albert Luthuli. It was a master card to play, not merely because of the continuing public ambivalence towards Winnie, but because Chief Albert Luthuli still occupies a special ...”

“... in poems as ‘Like a faun my head uplifted/In delicate mists’, and an imagined lover as ‘the lady in the leopard’s skin’ with ‘roses in her waving hair’. Even in an ambitious later poem like ‘The Analysis of Love’, where the manner of Donne is deliberately invoked, the images have a vagueness remote from metaphysical exactness, as in verses ...”

“... the box, their surgeon and his mate leaning out of the windows, and all of them now joined by the lady on deck, singing Ah tutti contenti saremo cosi, ah tutti contenti saremo, saremo cosi, with surprisingly melodious full-throated happiness.’ O’Brian sustains threads of narrative and develops relationships rather as the voices may be imagined carrying ...”

“... to A Room of One’s Own, a riposte to Woolf somewhat influenced by the work of Our Lady of Straw, Camille Paglia. Our discoveries of female poets of the past, Greer claims, are not real discoveries. The women writers who have been picked up will soon be put down again. Seldom do they have any lasting power, or any true or great poetic ...”

“... was, in fact – and had been for years – a great lover of pickled eggs. There is an old lady hot dog seller in the Strand who looks just like a hot dog, with onions for ear-rings. There was the bloke I met in Durham Cathedral two months ago who looked like the stone gargoyles he professed to adore, and in Strathclyde I know any number of old folk ...”

“... personally to have persuaded Churchill to recall Spears from the Levant. And he affronted and hurt Lady Spears, the Chicago-born writer ‘Mary Borden’, who had brought the Hadfield-Spears Ambulance Unit, fully equipped and herself its nursing boss, to the French Armies in the bitter winter of 1939-40, and headed it and its vehicles, with Union ...”

“... of her sister, had used her earnings to help smuggle 29 Jews out of Germany. Forgotten now was Lady Josephine Clarke (Errol Fitzgerald) who had retired hurt in 1951 when her 52nd novel, Unwanted Bride, was returned unwanted. Boon retained editorial control. Under the new regime those authors who felt their talents and integrity had been impugned by ...”