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“... for example, interesting as the novel’s relation to the historical ill-doings of Lord and Lady Grey, Lady Henrietta Berkeley et al may be, gets hopelessly sidetracked in speculations about the covert political schemes of Lord Sunderland. Similarly, Todd’s account of Oroonoko devotes far too much time to qualifying ...”

“... developments. Marcus draws attention to the battle of the sexes: Comus’s seduction speech to the lady could almost be a conscious reworking and critique of ‘Corinna’s going a maying’. Milton sees that the traditional phallicism of the rustic revels might not have been so agreeable to women concerned for their safety. These political readings of Comus ...”

“... she boomed, ‘that Mr Higham was able to find a reputable British publisher for his book.’ Lady Donaldson doesn’t believe for a moment that either the Duke or Duchess of Windsor were even pro-Nazi. She follows in a long line of biographers, historians and journalists who concede, since it is plainly on the record, that the Duke and Duchess were both ...”

“... the shadows cast on the road.’ Millais was enraptured. The more practical Wilkie raced after the lady. Up to now, all that was known about this woman in white was her name, Caroline Graves, that she became Collins’s mistress and inspired a melodramatic scene in his best-known novel. By careful inspection of Census returns and marriage certificates, Clarke ...”

“... whole’) in A Farewell to Arms, which were derived from Hemingway’s friend, Barklie Henry; even Lady Emerald Cunard remarking to Cyril Connolly that Hemingway struck her ‘as androgynous’. ‘You may think it bizarre of me.’ she added, ‘It is not the mot juste perhaps. But that is how he struck me.’ Bizarre no more. For if Lynn occasionally pushes ...”

“... remained undecorated, a spell in Canada as ADC to the Governor-General and marriage to Lady Dorothy Cavendish, Macmillan became MP for Stockton in 1924. The high unemployment in the North-East between the wars, with its attendant misery, affected Macmillan all his life. He tried hard at the time to improve conditions there and resolved that they ...”

“... with stories (The Proscribed Royalist) and pictures from stories (Mariana). They were all famous. Lady Constance Leslie met Millais at the exhibition, head bowed. ‘Ah, Lady Constance,’ he said, ‘you see me unmanned. Well, I’m not ashamed to say that on looking at my earliest pictures I have been overcome with ...”

“... books or staging unexpected new plays anonymously. The revelation that he was the author of The Lady of Lyons proved so humiliating to the Times in 1838 that it retaliated with an attack which W.C Macready called ‘vulgar, virulent and impotent from its display of malice’. Bulwer-Lytton was thought too delicate for education at Eton, and was tutored at ...”

“... to take her up. Vanity Fair gushed in 1877: ‘All male London is going wild about the Beautiful Lady who has come to us from the Channel Islands ... She has a husband to make her happy, but still awaits a poet to make her known.’ Her husband most certainly did not make her happy, but Oscar Wilde volunteered for the poet’s position and spent a night ...”

“... rather than in a bargain for sex. Perhaps, but who knows? It is the very invisibility of the young lady, or the impossibility of interpreting her, that fascinated Goethe, as it had fascinated Ter Borch before him. While Steen extended performance to include one and all, Ter Borch here is opting out, as it were. He calls attention in his own way, as Vermeer and ...”

“... rewriting ‘The Jolly Corner’ or possibly even The Turn of the Screw, but not The Portrait of a Lady or The Tragic Muse, much as their subjects would interest her. The claims I have been making – for the whole oeuvre, I should add – are high, and I do indeed think of her as our best novelist. Although she is much admired and giggled at, I doubt if this ...”

“... figures such as William Godwin – who called her “a piquant mixture between a milkmaid and a lady” – to the elegant Sir Charles Bunbury, formerly the husband of the Lady Sarah Lennox with whom George III had been so much in love before duty forced him to marry his German queen.’ There’s also a Victorianism of ...”

“... his continuing search for a father. His mother emerges as a feckless but not altogether unlikeable lady who conditioned her child to moonlight flits from hotels in the Cromwell Road, and who was constantly explaining to his chums, and everyone else, that she had mislaid her handbag and was short of a fiver. On one occasion, Guinness came home on leave to find ...”

“... she elides dialogue and comment, kidnapping voices to express what an individual would never say. Lady ‘Rogue’ Singleton is courted with a jingling rhyme which dashes her hopes of a glamorous match: Come, wed me, Lady Singleton, And we will have a baby soon And we will live in Edmonton. Her reply has the boom of ...”

“... near what people in this country feel like inside. Coming back from town, I see Mrs Holmes, the lady next door, standing on her doorstep. She shows me her knitting. She’s had migraine badly, so could only manage to cable two-thirds up and knit the rest plain, but it looks fine. She’s lived here for over thirty years, and she’s waiting on the step for ...”