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“... 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 ...”

“... an old White Russian relative of mine told me recently. Her indomitable life has included being a lady-in-waiting to a grand duchess, working as a reporter for the BBC and finally running a hostel for former mental patients. ‘I loved my lunatics,’ she said once, and then added: ‘It is love they need.’ She is 86 and she should know. When all the ...”

“... films are those no one has heard of.’ I name two for a start: Closely Observed Trains and The Lady with the Little Dog, the latter of which could take the place of Battleship Potemkin, which was always very boring. And here is another poll of more urgent interest. Forty per cent of Church of England clergy support unilateral nuclear disarmament, 49 per ...”

“... and in their spare time to entertain us with their pretty ways. We are a good deal nearer to Lady Fortescue’s Perfume from Provence than to anything by Wyndham Lewis. Perhaps that is the truth about Mr Grigson. He ought never to have fallen among literary intellectuals. It has all been a mistake. He doesn’t like them, and his liking for literature ...”

“... he took considerable pains, sending one of her pen-and-ink drawings to Time and Tide (where Lady Rhondda rejected it with the ease of long practice), and refusing to destroy some of Margaret’s letters, although he thought keeping letters a ‘mischievous habit’. ‘Your way of putting the stuff together is the right way.’ Only – and this was a ...”

“... Asya had sat on the stump of a tree and watched Deena talk to a bewildered-looking grey-haired lady ... She must be the mother of the other leftist: the independent, Asya had thought. Occasionally one of the black smocked women would walk up to the great wooden doors and bang on them and a small inset door would open and a guard would shout ‘Not yet, not ...”

“... that Keats asked, and he was pretty indignant about the answer. With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt, Enriched from ancestral merchandise, And for them many a weary hand did swelt In torched mines and noisy factories, And many once proud-quivered loins did melt In blood from stinging whip; with hollow eyes Many all day in dazzling river stood To take ...”