“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... image involved adding a decade and a half to my age and switching gender, but I was a very old lady in the pool, much like the brave and relentless Barbara Frietchie.Back in the real world, I looked out of the window. There was no one on the street outside. This was not unusual. In the suburbs of LA there is usually no one on the street outside. My ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the person who almost told the story on TV, believes the mother’s ghost is helping the old lady out. Agustina’s own mother disappeared around the time of the fire. Raimunda and her companions return, in the literal, mundane sense, to Madrid, and the film dives into a brisk mix of old Hollywood melodrama and new Spanish soap, with a glance at Italian ...”

“... Michelangelo gave to Vittoria Colonna – a pious, aristocratic and extraordinarily well-connected lady – the athletic body becomes the vehicle of pathos, as it was in the pietàs which he carved both at the beginning and at the very end of his career as a sculptor. There are drawings for those here too. In drawings in which the supremely energetic body type ...”

“... presumably a reference to Thatcher’s early incarnation as the ‘Milk Snatcher’, with her Iron Lady years still to come. ‘She looked magnificent,’ our narrator tells us with Alan Clarke awe as Joyce and her cohorts deliver the Scheme’s coup de grâce fifty pages later, ‘and at that moment I realised the future belonged to people like her.’ The ...”

“... in on their own. Thus there’s a painting of Philip IV by Velázquez hung next to Vermeer’s Lady with Her Maid and a self-portrait of Rembrandt in old age; none is lit, they don’t complement one another, and together look like a trio of mud-coloured pictures. It would be more sensible to arrange the collection chronologically: the way it is now, one ...”

“... not take out the minimal insurance of either neutralising the description entirely (the bag lady joke is not so funny as to be indispensable) or drawing on fictional licence and inventing a winner who in no respect (sex, age group, type of novel) could be construed as a slur on Ms Byatt – the jet-lagged Antipodean, for example? Bradbury can mount a ...”

“... apprentice the moment she found an opportunity to become resident housekeeper to the widowed Lady Fetherstonhaugh (who had once been a dairymaid). In Tono-Bungay, Wells has a wickedly funny description of teatime in the housekeeper’s room at Bladesover House, based on one of his rare visits to his mother. Between Wells’s snobbish upper servants and ...”

“... with cross-dressing in the theatre and fiction, might have influenced the culturally-aware young lady. The theatrical literary quality emerges clearly from the accounts of Nadezhda Durova, a soldier in the Russian wars against Napoleon, known after her initial sortie, by the Tsar at least, to be a woman, although she insisted she was unknown to others, and ...”