“... 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 ...”

“... are absolutely at home with her disrupted deeps, mingling with them as freely as a society lady with lushes and misfits at a cocktail party. This is shown in a specially graphic way by what must remain her masterpiece, though she always hated hearing it referred to as such, The Death of the Heart. The young Eddie and the 16-year-old Portia live darkly ...”

“... face. In January 1994 the Home Secretary received a protest from a visitor to the prison, Lady Olga Maitland, about these shenanigans. ‘Lady Olga didn’t mention security,’ he observed. ‘She didn’t mention any of the things we subsequently discovered went on.’ Howard is not a man who recognises the tip of ...”

“... arbitrary, skirmishing with enemies who have long since vanished, condescending to the views of ‘lady students’, and assuming a virtually direct access both to the mind of the maker and to the responses of the original audience. The hitherto unpublished pieces – a letter to a colleague who had ventured to disagree on a point of interpretation, an unfair ...”

“... a medical questionnaire to all the women who had attended Newnham and Girton in Cambridge, and Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville in Oxford. They were asked to assess their state of health on a scale from ‘excellent’ to ‘dead’ (some forms were necessarily completed by the families of those who had not survived) at different periods of their ...”

“... for the Northwest Passage in the 1840s only further fuelled the imaginative drama of the ice. Lady Jane Franklin, reminding the nation of her husband’s heroism with her own heroic bearing, whipped up sympathy and money for years of searching which finally located the bodies of the party – though not the remains of Franklin himself. But the drama of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... father had died in 1660). He agreed, and remarked in his diary on ‘this Miracle of a young Lady in a licentious Court & so deprav’d an age’. Evelyn drew an altar with a heart on it and a pentacle beneath it, and Margaret inscribed it: ‘Be this the symbol of inviolable friendship.’ Before long he was referring to Margaret in his diary simply by ...”

“... on them, literally kissing Rayburn’s bald head, endlessly inviting them round so that his wife, Lady Bird, could give them good ole Southern cooking and rescue them from the loneliness they dreaded. ‘Loneliness breaks the heart,’ Rayburn used to say, ‘loneliness consumes people.’ With Rayburn and Russell as a base, LBJ built up his position in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has a young daughter of her own. In One for My Baby Alfie’s new love, Jackie Day, is a feisty lady down on her luck – she’s a cleaner. In Man and Boy Harry’s new love, Cyd, was also a feisty lady down on her luck – she was a waitress. In both novels Harry/Alfie is assaulted by the ex-boyfriend, and in both cases ...”

“... liberating from domestic drudgery and the guilt that comes of avoiding it than having a cleaning lady who loves cleaning, a child-carer who’s content with child-care, a homebody who wants nothing more than to be at home. And Martha Freud was all those things. Quite why she was those things is something that her husband might have been the very person to ...”

“... a Hollywood star, then a hard-drinking rabble-rouser, and finally a grand and rather sad old lady with a corgi and a maid living in one of those sadly grand houses in Knightsbridge. In between, she made some pictures. I read a large proportion of this book on a train, sitting opposite a woman immersed in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective ...”