“... affairs. This was careless. Robinson had been close to Blair – the Prime Minister and First Lady took their children on holiday to his Tuscan villa – but by December, his loyalties were clearly with Brown. He had been all but finished by successive scandals. As his reputation was shredded, the Brownites were tormented by suspicion. Unnamed ...”

“... or if it did, it happened in the privacy of Beethoven’s home.) There’s the one about Liszt the lady-killer. In reality, Liszt was more of a Cary Grant than a Clark Gable, more Don Ottavio than Don Giovanni – although he did play the latter on stage. According to Charles Rosen: ‘With his international reputation for erotic conquest already set’, Liszt ...”

“... the museum a million dollars made a frontal attack. Irwin reports it: Later that evening this lady came up to me and told me, literally told me that I was not to do this kind of thing any more, that I was no longer to perform in this way ... She just insisted that the whole thing was absolutely un-Christian and anti-American ... I was to cease and ...”

“... grandmother – my mother’s mother – Dona Tranquilina.’ Tranquilina means ‘the Quiet Old Lady’ in Spanish. ‘She was a fabulous storyteller who could tell wild tales of the supernatural with a most solemn expression on her face. As I was growing up, I often wondered whether or not her stories were truthful. Usually, I tended to believe her because ...”

“... been many little boys like that, whom wisdom and love turned into sober members of society. But Lady Montgomery – it was entirely in character that on her husband’s becoming Prelate of the Order of St Michael and St George she adopted the style of an (honorary) knight’s wife, though she had no right to it – was not wise in the management of a tough ...”

“... her name in our language is called CREDIT ... ’Tis strange to think how absolute this lady is; how despotically she governs all her actions: if you court her, you lose her, or must buy her at unreasonable rates; and if you don’t discharge her to a tittle of your agreement, she is gone, and perhaps may never come again as long as you live ...”

“... Channon (by no means out of place), and Charlie Chaplin. All the Coopers are there: Lady Diana, Duff, Gladys, Gary and Tommy. There are Douglases, from Lord Alfred to Mr and Mrs Kirk; here are the Nicholses, Beverley and Mike; and you must distinguish, if you will, between Elizabeth Taylors one (actress), two (novelist) and three (friend of ...”

“... vice-chancellors to stop admitting students whose spelling and grammar are not up to scratch. Lady Blatch, a junior education minister, has called on school examining boards to exclude television programmes from the assessment material for English courses. Behind Mr Patten and Lady Blatch is a powerful group of ...”

“... of a ‘relation’, and after his death Charles explained that this relation was their mother, Lady Drysdale. Miriam Benn doubts whether tenderness for his mother’s sensibilities can really have been the motive for George’s determined anonymity, on the grounds that Lady Drysdale was quite thick-skinned about sex. I ...”

“... technically a breach of Parliamentary privilege. Hamilton untied that knot at once. Supported by Lady Thatcher, Lord Archer and the entire Parliamentary Tory Party, he conspired to force through Parliament an amendment to the Defamation Act which allows MPs to waive their privilege in order to sue for libel. Backed by his new law, Hamilton charged back into ...”

“... is closely connected to his hatred of Jews: by making women Jewish – Rachel née Rabinovitch, Lady Kleinwurm and Lady Katzegg – he overcame them; ‘by subordinating them to Jews, he diminished them’. Empson in an essay in Using Biography and Julius in a comment on it argue persuasively that Eliot’s hostility to ...”

“... to give.’ Thomson identifies similar themes in the later pictures, describing the action of The Lady from Shanghai as ‘furious and empty’, the Falstaff of Chimes at Midnight as ‘portentous and hollow’, the ‘heart’ of Touch of Evil as ‘a black hole’. Citizen Kane locates its hero’s emptiness in early childhood loss. That Welles himself was ...”

“... of his powers, taken from Education and the University (1943). He is discussing these lines from Lady Macbeth’s welcome to Duncan:                              All our service In every point twice done, and then done double Were poor and single business, to contend Against those honours deep and broad, wherewith Your Majesty ...”

“... historian’s insistence on evolution. The first poem he has chosen, an epitaph by Elizabeth, Lady Tanfield, is notable partly because it reveals the scope of the research which has gone into the preparation of this anthology (the text is inscribed on Sir Lawrence Tanfield’s tomb in Burton Parish Church), and partly because it is so resolutely ...”

“... Orianda will never marry the temperate Gerald but he’s unable to see it. In ‘The Handsome Lady’ the widowed Caroline tells the unhappily married John that ‘if there is love between you there is faithfulness, if there is no love there is no fidelity,’ but he’s too slow to take the hint or too worried there would be gossip, and by the time his ...”