“... life’; and he is startled by a boy in the Philippines giving a remarkable performance as Lady Macbeth and showing ‘a quality of sinister ambition that was somewhat disquieting’. He relishes the expression on the faces of a group of Rotarians and their matrons watching a cabaret consisting of four boys and girls dancing naked, painted gilt and ...”

“... that of Sir Walter Erle scouting around Corfe Castle dressed in a bear’s skin, or the formidable Lady Brilliana Harley’s ingenious resort to patriarchal ideology. Stoutly defending her Herefordshire house against the King’s forces, she replied to a call to surrender that she could not possibly do so without her absent husband’s permission. Carlton ...”

“... persistently fascinated by royalty. It is, of course, not an unusual taste, as the publication of Lady Longford’s entertaining scrapbook abundantly testifies.* She gives us, for example, the full story of the Daily Express’s scoop in 1982: ‘INTRUDER AT THE QUEEN’S BEDSIDE – She kept him talking for ten minutes ... Then a footman came to her ...”

“... Since scientific tests showed it contained no glucose.Only This Morning, said the other man, a lady rang me up from the Lake District, where two years ago she and her children, while walking around the shore of a tarn, also came upon this white jelly, and on that occasion there were 16 lumps.The man from Japanese TV was hunkered down and searching in his ...”

“... work and uncomfortable dreams. Even when they are fortunate, like Mrs Hanratty in ‘Luck Be a Lady’, who has unprecedented wins at the bingo, they betray themselves. There is only one man on the Bingo Coach, and ‘She wanted him. It was as simple as that. A woman of 55, a woman with 5 children and 1 husband, who had had sexual intercourse 1332 times in ...”

“... It enabled her to reveal unexploited talents, and without it we would have been denied her Lady Wishfort, her Mrs Candour and her Connie Sachs. Our first glimpse of Beryl, tipsy after a lunch party and asleep on her bed, is something to treasure. As she sleeps, life goes on for her ten cats and a punctual window-cleaner. Beryl the eccentric, holed up ...”

“... enthusiasts, unclear. But out of the indiscernible drama, each of the too famous late poems – ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Daddy’ – comes through as at all events a craftily composed Racinian tirade. One need only compare Plath’s punctuation with Lenier’s to see the difference – the difference, that is, between a schooled and responsible poet who has ...”

“... escape from captivity in Mexico to seek their homelands, and the story of the death of the old lady in her old Scottish country house in ‘Miss Christian Jean’ are very different in their setting but similar in narrative tone. It is perhaps strange that a writer who could write with such passionate vigour of the abuses that embitter people’s lives ...”

“... No National Service. More women around than men. No secret police. Getting away with books like Lady C. Not bad.’ Barnes’s modest analysis of the not-badness of England is in stark contrast to Marilyn French’s blockbuster, The Bleeding Heart. This is a truly international book: originated transatlantically (where it earned a near-record $1.9 m. in ...”

“... there were times when a handbag was just a handbag: ‘the child who opens the handbag of a lady is not necessarily expressing his curiosity whether his mother’s womb conceals another baby.’ True enough, but one still has to have a theory capable of indicating when for a child handbags are handbags and handbags are wombs. In this and other ...”

“... vengeance on me’. Beaverbrook’s vengeance was as likely to have been provoked by thoughts of Lady Beaverbrook – a figure conveniently absent from West’s fictional account – as by any knowledge of how he might be presented in the novel, where an attempt is made to render him humane as well as thrilling. Beaverbrook’s devotion to Bonar Law is ...”

“... or Scots songs for a few pennies, selling wild birds, or merely wandering – like Long Tom and Lady Mackintosh, he with his roll of oilcloth under the arm, she crocheting as she walked. David watched the moment in spring when the cattle are let out of the byre where they have stood all winter and, dazzled by light and unsteady on their feet, move out to ...”

“... than a person – a mere speculation. By contrast, for instance, Auden’s invention of a bearded lady in The Rake’s Progress was not only daring but necessary and appropriate: in the context of the opera, it created a need for what it supplied. But Patrick White’s exercises in buffo extravaganza, his 1914 St Mayeul, the Byzantine connection, or the ...”

“... disappointment, verbal jokes and hope. At the end of the book his characters – La Corona (the lady on the cigar box), the tin frog, the incense burner, the mouse, the magnifying glass and so on – stand on the window ledge, about to escape into the real moonlit world outside. The drawing showing this is the best in the book, but it is the only one which ...”

“... she does not know. To Kensington came young Emilia Francis Strong, later Mrs Pattison, later Lady Dilke, to draw the nude under Mulready’s instruction. It was good to see, my source relates, ‘the old man’s handsome but satirical face ripple all over with a welcoming smile as he saw the little figure come trotting in with a portfolio of drawings on ...”