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“... bet. Knowing nothing about all this, I opted for a .38 lent me by a dear old Jewish Communist lady who said: look, I always carried it but I never fired it. Other friends said there’s nothing like a shotgun. Just the sound of someone loading it and cocking it will freak out most burglars. It can shoot right through doors, after all. Robbie ...”

“... him, just as his arrows sting lovers.) Cranach’s Venus stands in the wild wood, more like the lady in the ballad who abducts True Thomas from a goddess. Faint, downy wisps of pubic hair suggest that she is a distant ancestress of Balthus’s nymphets, yet body and face are ageless rather than young. Much of the catalogue (Paul Holberton, £20) is ...”

“... more: one night I crawled down to the sad little piano bar; I can’t even remember whether the lady artiste was topless or not. Earl Hines was on somewhere but I’d heard him quite recently in England.’ Twenty years later, Roy and his second wife, Joyce Holliday, turned up on my doorstep in San Francisco. They had been touring the American West: the ...”

“... river with three mysterious scars on her neck, and she works nights at the facility as a cleaning lady. Near the end of the movie, when Strickland is hunting for the people who helped the creature to escape, he asks for their name, rank and number. The dying Russian, battered by this question and thinking of Elisa and her friend, stammers: ‘No rank and ...”

“... by adding facial hair, Duchamp linked Leonardo’s ‘homosexuality to this intellectually aloof lady’ and thus ‘exposed the raw sexual ambivalence underlying her image’. We may imagine a lawyer representing Titch Thomas (who, in Larkin’s poem, has signed the desecrated poster) justifying the action thus to a perplexed magistrate. For the ...”

“... a tincture of opium, but he goes and he is instantly enraptured by Miss Chumley, an orphan Lady Somerset is taking out to India. They get along very well, and on returning to his ship Talbot, still very strange, takes over Colley’s cabin to leave his for her. They get on even better at the ball in spite of some trouble from Deverel, drunk in defiance ...”

“... his old Fabian intimates, the Webbs and Wells, and had a joky intimacy with persons as diverse as Lady Astor, Virginia Woolf and the heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. He was sporadically in touch, affectionate and censorious, with Mrs Patrick Campbell, and kept a kindness for scapegraces such as Lord Alfred Douglas and Frank Harris, in whose biography of Shaw ...”

“... copies of unknown men, women and children stacked around the walls of his studio he found the lady.’ Hunty’s pen raced. Lennox emptied his brandy glass. Hunty loudly called for more. The beautiful young colleen who enchanted the heart of James Joyce, shapely and red-haired, her eyelashes still moist with the dews of Connemara ... Great ...”

“... in a film until it actually happens, it does seem likely that this autumn we will be shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star ...”

“... conceived as a serious highbrow literary quarterly subsidised by the arts-dabbling socialite Lady Rothermere, wife of the younger of the Harmsworth press barons. He had quickly made it both the leading journal for mainstream modernism in literature and the home of an anti-liberal, anti-romantic form of classicism in culture and politics more ...”

“... on Port an expert, and a joker, had died not long ago, and Violet resided with her aunt. This lady was of the kind of learned booby that abounds in England – unlike her brother, thin and haughty, she always used a walking stick, she delivered lectures to the workers, she revered culture’s ideal and considered – inter al.– Kharkov a Russian ...”

“... public who simply refused to read his books: after the last mild success of The Portrait of a Lady in 1881, James experienced half a lifetime of small and dwindling sales, which culminated, in the case of the New York Collected Edition, in total failure. Edith made thousands. But of course both she and the contemporary reading public had a point. There ...”

“... with something approaching innocence; at other times, as with Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady or Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove, it would be done out of dark need; in the end, as with Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl, it would be done with aplomb and so stylishly that no one was sure they had noticed. During this first visit alone to ...”

“... been invaded by the American Friendship Society (‘Lois Ravenna Jr,’ says the name tag of the lady opposite). They are a middle-aged to elderly group, ladies whom I would call ‘game’ (and Barry Humphreys ‘spunky’). They know they cannot expect the creature comforts on offer at the Wichita Hilton but they are determined not to complain or be ...”

“... dwells on a particular form to tease out the meanings, and not vice versa. Unlike the naked lady next to Courbet in the painting, the beggar woman defeats the male gaze. She doesn’t titillate or arouse, at least not in the usual ways. Take her legs: ‘bare, flabby, pale, unhealthy, yet not without a certain unexpected, pearly sexual allure, the right ...”