“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... idealistic romantic nihilism of the decade. The freedom of language heralded by the acquittal of Lady Chatterley, the freedom of sexual action offered by the pill, and the distrust of almost any kind of organisation plus an overwhelming stress on the importance of individual fulfilment, combined to impress readers who loved the hyperbole and rhetoric, shared ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Parsis were staunch supporters of the British in India, and on their marriage, Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer received a set of embroidered doylies from the Parsi community of Bombay. There are elements of the same loyalty in The Golden Thread. Not for this author the arms-length distrust of the British as tight-lipped and thin-blooded. She admires ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”