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“... hope it may be the last time we will have to send you congratulations on such an occasion,’ Lady Grant wrote back to her daughter with some impatience after James, number 13. Why, given their intelligence and scientific pragmatism, the Stracheys did not control their fertility is a point on which Caine is disappointingly silent. Had they done ...”

“... Dream’ for Il Penseroso or Parnell’s ‘A Night-piece on Death’; his mock diatribe ‘To a Lady who put herself into a bad way, by taking Spirit of Nitre, by Spoonfuls, instead of a few Drops’ for Gay or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; and ‘The Motto on Pug’s Collar’, ‘On Sir Isaac Newton’ (‘O’er ...”

“... After a honeymoon period – at an exhilarating time for the firm, with the acquittal of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in November 1960 – friction developed. Two publishing visions were in conflict. Godwin extended the list into the territory associated with Calder (Camus, Sartre, Svevo, Brecht, Genet), and moved it leftwards, with Penguin Specials ...”

“... sorry for her – we deeply commiserate her case.’ Ainsworth, he gives us to understand, is a ‘lady-killer’, he is ‘this Turpin of the cabriolet’. He did not expect his readers literally to become highwaymen, or even lady-killers; but he did expect them to identify with Turpin’s courage, audacity and ...”

“... who came out with chicken soup for an apparently dead man in the road, and when a doctor said, ‘Lady, it won’t help,’ replied: ‘Mister, it won’t hoit.’ Now, I confess, I am less sure. There are still ways in which the new dispensation is capable of doing long-term as well as short-term harm, not least by judicial abstention; but there is also ...”

“... Danish wife with Yorkshire connections, another, with the good Old English name of Waltheof, on a lady from the ruling native family of Bamborough, and placating other magnates like Thorfinn Thorsson from Allerdale (‘mac Thore’ as he is revealingly called in a Cumbrian writ). But whatever Shakespeare may say, Siward’s march on Macbeth in 1054 was not a ...”

“... who continued to read the description of the Ottoman Empire by the Russells’ contemporary Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and later accounts by Sir Richard Burton or Gertrude Bell, ignored the Russells. A new imperial readership expected ‘serious’ writers like Burckhardt (who was sent to Aleppo in 1809 to study how to disguise himself as a Muslim) to ...”

“... Ill take it!​ ’ I said, glancing round the empty apartment. The lady didn’t smile or show any sign of agreement. I was beginning to feel uneasy. She’d looked up at me questioningly when I knocked on the open door of her office a few minutes earlier. Something about me must have given me away. The new blocks of flats were in a perfect location, halfway between my village and Nahariyya, a small seaside town in the Galilee ...”

“... jiggy on a Saturday night. At the Royalty in Southgate, the Goldmine in Canvey Island, the Lacy Lady in Ilford, Raquel’s in Rayleigh, the New Penny in Watford, the kids in their mother’s pussy-bow blouses were getting into what Dylan Jones calls ‘a decade of cultural deregulation’. ‘We all wanted to escape into something that wasn’t really ...”

“... of need and, perhaps, suffocated desire’: ‘Sometimes you are afraid to listen to this lady.’The cousins scoop up a harmonica player called Delta Slim (a riotous Delroy Lindo). As the trio motor through Clarksdale, he recognises some men on a chain gang and tries to lift their spirits. ‘Hold your heads!’ he shouts, before an overseer blasts ...”

“... which one of you is Mrs Bloyard?’ snaps a moustachioed French police inspector to a shingled lady and a man in a Charvet scarf. Wimples, however, are only worn by males, who must also be untidily clad in tweed jackets and grey flannels. Baxter’s art may not prove able to resist for much longer the critic’s urge to interpret and to categorise. All ...”

“... girls are purported to be the wildest. Add to this a prim, chaste mother who lives with a pious lady companion; a father who makes brief dazzling appearances and who is the personification of ‘debonair’; and an Aunt Bunch who takes drugs and ‘goes about with Negroes’ (a vile body indeed). Bursting with sap, like a liana on an over-mown lawn, Wyndham ...”

“... near the hotel recorded the names of several men who had fallen climbing. ‘The mountain,’ the lady wrote, sitting on the balcony of the hotel, ‘is a symbol ... ’ She paused. She could see the topmost height through her glasses. She focused the lens, as if to see what the symbol was. She was writing to her elder sister in Birmingham. The balcony ...”

“... are told – but what’s the difference? The plot is straightforward police-procedural: grand old lady is battered to death in Belgravia, dogged but unusually imaginative policeman works his way through the half a dozen or so sure-fire suspects, and gets a bit of help on the side from our hero, a ruminative, world-weary ex-spy called Humphrey Leigh. But as a ...”

“... Perhaps he should retreat to Ireland and safety? A priest offers him assistance from the Our Lady of Knock Fund for Reverse Emigration. But he continues his quest. There are a great many ingenious plots here interlaced, and the book in general supports the learned opinion of Angelica, which is that romance avoids the fate of ‘classic’ narrative ...”