“... Brougham had been a terror and a torment in his time. To Lord Sefton he was ‘the Archfiend’; Lady Grey, in a shrewder assessment, identified him with Dryden’s Achitophel. No one, it is true, had ever been able to deny his extraordinary abilities, or the almost frenetic energy with which he applied them to the innumerable objects he had in contemplation ...”

“... realist, operating within the “world” presented in the work’. It is not ashamed to ask about Lady Macbeth’s children, or to speculate on the behaviour and motivation of characters in terms similar to those we employ when trying to comprehend the actions of our associates and friends. Although Nuttall admits that certain of the ideas put forward by ...”

“... up to now this remarkable politician’s appearances on television have been like those of Our Lady of Lourdes in the Pyrenees. We know that both he and She show themselves from time to time, and that they are potentially able to work miracles. But no one can actually think of a major, sustained speech, illuminating the most urgent problems of our ...”

“... important – who chose food, clothes and furnishings ‘not without care but without taste’. Lady Strachey’s principled charmlessness seems to have extended to her way with words: Dorothy Strachey remembers a romance-shrivelling reading of Tom Jones and a lot of good talk which left the children edgy and bored. In recalling the infrequent interventions ...”

“... But it is nothing of the kind. Most of the facts will be familiar to anyone conversant with Lady Donaldson’s study, and most of the gossip is merely being dished up again for the umpteenth time. The author seems unable to decide whether his story is a latterday version of Cinderella, Pygmalion, Gone with the Wind, Hamlet or Othelio. His understanding ...”

“... illuminate all men and all women. Poirier’s early study of Henry James through The Portrait of a Lady already urges us to think of Isabel Archer ‘as an Emersonian Becky Sharp’ who chooses to marry a parody of Emerson’s transcendentalist, and only then sees her error. The seed of all Poirier is in one prophetic paragraph that exalts American literary ...”

“... did it repeatedly. They were showing off for the journalists, and clearly trying to wind up the lady officer. A man from the Mail on Sunday walked round and round the Close, chapping on all the doors, getting himself steamed up. Every time he heard something interesting – and often when he heard something not – he’d draw out his mobile phone and call ...”

“... reputation have fluctuated so dramatically since his death. To be sure, the embattled author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not alone among High Modernists in having been labelled a proto-fascist reactionary, a racist, a misogynist, an élitist and (no doubt in a range of other formulations I’m not remembering at the moment) a paradigmatic Bad Boy. And ...”

“... response towards not pity or empathy but horror – hence the affinity with Jacobean drama. When Lady Macbeth says she would have plucked the nipple from her infant’s mouth and dashed his brains out, she is remembering Seneca’s Medea – the couple are childless, after all, as Macbeth’s obsession with his future lineage makes plain (there is no ...”

“... most prominent leaders – Millicent Garrett Fawcett, widow of a Liberal government minister, and Lady Frances Balfour, daughter of the Whig Duke of Argyll and sister-in-law of the Conservative politician and later prime minister A.J. Balfour – had both left the Liberal Party over its embrace of Irish Home Rule. Throughout the late Victorian period, the ...”

“... it’s the corner of Kenilworth Road and Gibbet Hill Road to the south of the university, and the lady sitting on the bench in the background must be waiting for a bus to take her into Coventry. Maybe she’s off shopping, or going to Coventry Market. We’re in a complex, long-established, urban economy here. And the sign isn’t to some vague place called ...”

“... it features as The Revelations of Chaos, Disraeli parodied both Vestiges and the craze it started. Lady Constance comes away, as many readers did, with a general impression that it explains everything and nothing:what is most interesting, is the way in which man has been developed. You know, all is development. The principle is perpetually going ...”

“... baron is tricked into marrying a local gardener’s daughter in the belief that she is a young lady of quality with jewels and a great fortune; the debts the girl incurs to Sally in getting herself ‘Rigg’d handsomely’ for the role are passed on to her new husband; and he ends up ‘in a Starving Condition’ in the Fleet Prison.These inversions ...”

“... troubled even so ardent a royalist. The worst of these was the notorious Essex divorce case, when Lady Frances Howard, favourite of James I, sought an annulment of her childhood marriage to the Earl of Essex, to marry another royal favourite, Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester. The lurid case involved spectacular bedroom revelations, allegations of ...”