“... just as they accept that Mrs Thatcher, in becoming a tough and warlike leader, had perforce, like Lady Macbeth, to unsex herself, an assumption fatuously confirmed by President Reagan some years ago when he called Mrs Thatcher ‘the best man amongst us’. Though Caroline Blackwood finds the militant lesbianism of a few of the Greenham women regrettable ...”

“... of Genji, when she joined the entourage of the Emperor’s daughter in the combined capacities of lady-in-waiting and literary lion. Her Diary of (chiefly) court life is, Mr Bowring considers, more probably a reconstruction in tranquillity than a compilation of day-to-day entries. It opens, in 1008 AD (Kanko 5 in the Japanese calendar of the time), with what ...”

“... he and Oscar were on bad terms ‘he came to me like a wounded stag, and I took him in.’ Lady Wilde, his mother, appears to have exerted a strong influence at this crisis: she imagined him in the dock, defying the authorities rather like Robert Emmet, and she said she would never speak to him again if he fled the country. She was a famous patriotic ...”

“... to the train from London to Northampton, he was treated to six summer weeks in a cottage on Lady Knightley’s estate, from which he sent Treves bunches of common wildflowers that were to him as exotic and wondrous as the Victoria regia lily. Only Treves knew that his condition could only grow worse. Within four years, though he was unaware of it, the ...”

“... her vagina. His mother is a successful faith-healer, assisted by a Red Indian spirit guide and a lady from the court of Marie Antoinette. (Do they never come from less celebrated areas, like, say, the Windward Isles or the court of Henry III?) The father sells a popular placebo, made of garlic-flavoured water, and this helps to finance the spiritualist ...”

“... or a female personification. The Latin god Autumnus was male, but there seems no doubt Keats had a lady in mind. None the less the perfect balance of the poem does seem to depend on a kind of neutral stasis of the sexual and sensual elements within it. Worth remembering, though, that Keats’s feelings and raptnesses were usually far from integrated. He ...”

“... the back of the Bunter residence. David Hughes even devises a comic genesis, involving Bunter, for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Billy Bunter? ‘Bunter,’ states Hughes’s narrator firmly at the start of the novel, ‘was a character in a schoolboy paper called the Magnet. He came on the scene in 1908 when he was 14 and vanished from it, having added not a ...”

“... as a peripatetic stud on the books of an agency called Self Service. The agency is run by a butch lady called Victoria Self, who wears hausfrau braids and a blue serge suit, and who hints at painful punishments awaiting those who infringe the rules of her exotic craft. This is one apparent strand in the plot. Another is that PB, an operator so unabashedly ...”

“... charmed lives they themselves are casting a spell, and offering us a share of their good fortune. Lady Luck is the presiding deity of such narratives. But when the memoirist is a European Jew, who survived the Second World War largely as a result of his solitary and reckless decision to abandon his family and country and emigrate to Palestine at the age of ...”

“... It is obviously the same person.’ The words of Lady Bracknell, one of the wisest characters in English literature, may eventually be echoed by readers when and if they have worked their way through the four, totally diverse, biographies of Graham Greene which originally appeared in the summer and autumn of last year ...”

“... Enlightenment man, the enthusiast, the bigot, the stubborn reactionary, the inane society lady. De Staël’s central characters – the tortured aristocrat, the generous heroine and the man of republican reason – are shadowed forth in Thomas Holcroft’s Anna St Ives (1792). It would seem that de Staël, who loved England and English ...”

“... He vowed that he ‘would prefer to sit in a Room with a Chime of Bells, ten Parrots and one Lady Westmorland to sitting in a cabinet with Lord Macaulay’. Melbourne might have been more scathing still about his latest biographer, Leslie Mitchell. Mitchell’s technique is to repeat – and repeat, and repeat again – his own unsympathetic spin on ...”

“... Everyone​  knows that Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC asked an Old Bailey jury in 1960 whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a book they would want their wives or servants to read. The jury – which included three women – is said to have laughed. Its acquittal of Penguin on a charge of violating the newly minted Obscene Publications Act 1959 is widely regarded as a turning point in the centuries-long persecution of literature and philosophy in the name of morality ...”

“... calling on the gods to stand up for bastards, or Lear petitioning and pleading with them, or Lady Macbeth’s ‘Unsex me here,’ or her husband’s final soliloquy (‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’), which borrows from Psalm 90. Inasmuch as Shakespeare’s soliloquies are addressed to the audience, we become God by proxy, the Delphic oracle ...”

“... that made her, and eventually her writing, so attractive. Leslie French remembered her playing a lady-in-waiting in Twelfth Night: ‘you never saw a lady waiting so well or so violently; she had terrific poise, so much poise I feared she would topple over backwards.’ In private life David was less restrained. She never ...”