“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Hickey’) of the Daily Express, 28 October 1986: ‘I just wanted to tell you the lady I was having dinner with last night was helping me with some research for my new book. She is a lady of the night.’ No contradiction, My Lord. We beg to submit that it is the second rather than the first of these two ...”

“... the author.) Examples come easily to hand. Byron’s attack on the Prince Regent, ‘Lines to a Lady Weeping’, was first published in the Morning Chronicle in March 1812, anonymously. The poem caused a small uproar at the time, but when he re-published it in February 1814 under his own name (among a group of short poems he printed with The Corsair) the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Consider the following sentences from Bloom’s lunch-time musings on aristocratic women. ‘Lady this. Powdered bosom pearls. The élite. Crème de la crème. They want special dishes to pretend they’re.’ The earliest draft of this passage, found in the famous Rosenbach manuscript which John Quinn purchased from Joyce, begins exactly as the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Cart – and glancing around the critic’s booklined study, and demonstrating what the erring lady took to be an extreme lack of sensibility, he is supposed to have remarked: ‘Books do furnish a room.’ The narrator thinks neither story is likely to be true, but that makes the nickname all the more irresistible. Drink, sex and scholarship point to one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ready to sink as it was. Well, said I, all I can say is, that if it is true, he has used a young lady abominably ill. Austen’s monologists are windy performers, who always enact the opposite of the laws they so like to propose. Mrs Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, may be the funniest example. ‘I do not like to boast of my child,’ she announces, while ...”

“... and I was six. The issue was how much of a two-barrel popsicle I was going to share with him. A lady came up to us and said, in German, that she would give us a nickel so that we could each have a treat of our own. I don’t remember buying a second popsicle, but I do remember being very excited at finding someone else of our linguistic species. I rushed ...”

“... and exposing furtive British moves towards a pact with the Third Reich. A special target was Lady Astor, who was antisemitic and violently hostile to both France and Soviet Russia, Britain’s only plausible allies in a war with Germany. She and Lord Astor, owner of the Times, used the paper to call for negotiations with Hitler. In November ...”

“... music, however: Gilliat, 34 years earlier, had been one of the screenwriters on Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. The plot of Endless Night also references Marnie in its inclusion of a horse-riding accident, while the final scene between the psychiatrist and the unrepentant murderer directly invokes the last minutes of Psycho. I first saw it on BBC One on the ...”