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“... he was examining the records of Zululand in 1881 that he came across a most improbable figure, Lady Florence Dixie, a reporter from the Morning Post. She is the key to this book, in the sense that it treats Late Victorian England as if it were an extension of the Dark Continent, wreathed in tribal loyalties and ritualised codes, made more vivid still by ...”

“... for sale in the back pages of Sotheby’s catalogues. There is also a wonderful description of the lady who sold him a pup – in this case, a dining-table. Fate does not forgive. A few months later the artful vendeuse was found in her own garage, headless, handles footless and run over five or six times by her own car. It was strongly rumoured, Dirk ...”

“... to enjoy her journey’s fruits. She resents the Australian press labelling her as ‘the camel lady’ – which is a bit much when she insists so vigorously on reminding us that she is a woman, after all. Early on she laments the National Geographic sponsorship, wherewith ‘I’d sold a great swatch of my freedom and most of the trip’s integrity for ...”

“... revelation in the book is that he had what must, I suppose, be called a ‘relationship’ with a lady, Margaret MacEwen, for over thirty years, and that nobody knew about it (though Margaret suspected that Gunn’s wife had her suspicions). Margaret has allowed this to be known and is quoted on this extraordinary situation. Not only did they meet ...”

“... have made of the image.Lilith also fascinated the Pre-Raphaelites. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith, she is an auburn-haired beauty admiring her image in a mirror, surrounded by roses and poppies. Rossetti wrote a sonnet to accompany the painting, where she is the ‘witch he [Adam] loved before the gift of Eve’, absorbed in her own ...”

“... to his later creation of elaborate works of art. His best feats perhaps are his killing of Lady Agatha, the suffragette, and of the ancient vicar, bumped off out of dynastic sequence because Louis decides his being so boring qualifies him for early dismissal. Agatha is distributing leaflets from a flying balloon. Louis punctures it with a shot from a ...”

“... for a school assignment. It was my mother. That can’t be my mother. Here was this vastly old lady Facing the camera unsmiling. My mother’s blue-eyed schizophrenia plus electroshock Had always kept her lovely skin unlined. The unlined woman of my memory and fantasy apparently Had turned into a raisin while I wasn’t looking, That I too must be ...”

“... offence, not a civil one, however, and carries a term of imprisonment.The Conservative minister Lady Williams told the House of Lords that these provisions were aimed at ‘the sorts of tactic we saw from Insulate Britain last autumn’ (when they blocked the M25 and other major roads). We can trust the police to enforce them proportionately, she ...”

“... sounds like it’s actually over, that’s probably because he decided early on not to let the fat lady out of her dressing room. Different Every Time, Marcus O’Dair’s fascinating authorised biography (Serpent’s Tail, £20), explains how much Wyatt had going for him at the outset and why the music is good. For a start there were his parents: his ...”

“... the absurd juxtapositions of Malevich’s ‘alogist’ works, such as Cow and Violin (1913). In Lady at the Advertising Column (1914), floating signs appear among colourful geometric forms that clearly prophesy Suprematism. There are premonitions, too, in Malevich’s designs for the avant-garde opera Victory over the Sun (1913). Here, much of the impulse ...”

“... from Symi. They’d had to climb the island’s 328-foot rockface to get to safety. ‘The old lady kept pleading with me for water,’ Fadia said. ‘“Just give me a tiny drop,” she’d say. And I had to say: “Sorry, we don’t even have a teaspoonful.”’ ‘After we’d been there five hours in the boiling heat, we managed to wave down a passing ...”

“... various ladylike adaptations of Eastern philosophies; later the pro-Fascist Jorian Jenks joined Lady Eve Balfour’s Soil Association as well as Kinship in Husbandry, started by the enthusiast for early Nazism Rolf Gardiner; Kathleen Raine converted from a modernist poet to found the Temenos Academy (current patron the Prince of Wales), with its Ten Basic ...”

“... of poems, often seems obsessed by the vis inertiae: ‘Mariana in the Moated Grange’, the Lady of Shalott pointlessly weaving, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, ‘Tithonus’, the endlessly dozing kraken which self-destructs as soon as it tries to do anything. I can’t come up with a Tennyson poem that doesn’t seem to glance at procrastination, aside from ...”

“... and a seductress and a schizophrenic to boot.) And what of Katerina Lvonava Ismailova, the ‘Lady Macbeth of Mitensk’, who, though initially less seducing than seduced, having once got the hang of fornication likes it so much that she strangles her husband and poisons her father-in-law (with mushrooms) rather than give it up? Such a plethora of ...”

“... costumes and sets – as if it were looking for a slot between Young Sherlock Holmes and My Fair Lady – it has an edge which is entirely contemporary in two senses. It belongs to the actual life of the men in question, not their legacy, and it speaks to concerns of the 21st century, where science looks more like magic every day. What sparks the ...”