“... It is framed by a series of undated, unlocated first-person replies from an anonymous, rather arch lady to those asking for funds and support. Like a Chinese box, each letter contains within itself versions of other letters the writer has received and drafts of the replies which she may send. ‘The fiction of the letters’, in Naomi Black’s phrase, acts as ...”

“... estate (two of them black). His luggage included a pair of greyhounds, a dog and a bitch called Lady (for hunting); a skiff (for netting marine specimens); a vast quantity of paper (for dried plants); glass cases, boxes and bottles; high-end optical instruments; fishing nets and tackle; a small arsenal of pistols, rifles, shotguns and ammunition (for sport ...”

“... In Alvin Kernan’s book The Death of Literature there is an account of the Lady Chatterley trial. It sports a pointless and omni-directed superciliousness so relentlessly predictable that if, for example, Rebecca West is cited making a perfectly tenable statement you can rely on being told that she was displaying ‘qualities that must have once made H ...”

“... continued to live with her mother (visiting her husband in Munich at weekends). And when the old lady died, in 2000, Jelinek stayed put. It’s hard to know what was stranger in this set-up: the fact that she could write without inhibition under the daily supervision of her monstrous mother, or that her mother continued to do her daughter’s washing and ...”

“... in terms that resemble Yeats’s poems about Coole Park, the home of his patron and collaborator Lady Gregory: Great people lived and died in this house; Magistrates, colonels, members of Parliament, Captains and Governors, and long ago Men that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne. Some that had gone on Government work To London or to India came home to ...”

“... a passage from Macbeth, an echo scholars have missed. After murdering Duncan, Macbeth tells Lady Macbeth that his grooms woke up briefly and cried ‘God bless us!’ and ‘Amen’, as if they ‘had seen me with these hangman’s hands’ – that is, hands bloody after disembowelling someone who is being executed for treason. ...”

“... which can never be lost again’. As early as 1823 a tribute poem addressed by a ‘young lady’ to her ‘married sister’ appeared in the Monthly Review, which announced that the Vale of Avoca was already ‘famous in song’: ‘Sweet vale of Avoca!’ our tongues were repeating, While our eyes from the bridge saw the two rivers meeting. After ...”

“... of the approved constitution – this can be seen, for example, in pictures of the birth of Our Lady. But such an expedient was itself something of a dietetic insult to the system, since wet-nursing by a woman other than the mother violates the immunity mechanism, a system so remarkably adapted to circumstance that the fouling of the mother’s breast by ...”

“... away from the marvellous texture of the poems by making them into performances.’ Her kind was Lady Lazarus, the come-back queen. ‘I do not want to be known as the mad-suicide poet, the live Sylvia Plath,’ she told her students at Boston University: but she auditioned for the role and rehearsed it in book after book until she wrapped herself in her ...”

“... with a picture of the Virgin Mary and a phone number on the back where she can be reached: ‘Our lady has granted her presence to people just like you.’ The Virgin Mary is their good fairy and stern mother. Like their real mother, she denies their sexuality, their changing bodies; only in death can they be immaculate. Jeffrey Eugenides writes well; his ...”

“... globe, commonly by readers who couldn’t begin to negotiate them in the original. Cervantes and Lady Murasaki have the gift of universality. What, then, does the Chin P’ing Mei have to offer the general reader? In its first volume, anyway, the book achieves one of the primary goals of satire, creating characters of sufficient vexatiousness that the reader ...”

“... opposition, his approach was made through the Cliveden set. It was the best contact he had, since Lady Astor’s son David was his friend. Besides, Chamberlain was in power: however strongly Trott may have deplored his stance, the Prime Minister was the man he had to influence. The third reason is this: in order to be able to travel and fulfil his ...”

“... the piano lessons, but Madame Richter is still present, making sure it is done right. The old lady ‘seemed not to have changed, except that she had only a few strands of her white hair left and almost no teeth. Even her black coat looked the same, green with age and threadbare.’ Here one must feel sympathy with the novelist labouring under ...”

“... breath: ‘I’d give it to my granddaughter Jeannie tomorrow it only she would settle down.’ (Lady Jean Campbell, herself an Evening Standard contributor, who had taken me to the lunch, had just started going out with Norman Mailer.) But what I now think was probably genuine was the acknowledgment on the proprietor’s part that Wintour enjoyed ...”

“... there to say about it? Why should Coetzee devote 12 essays to the subject, on topics including the Lady Chatterley trial, the persecution of Osip Mandelstam and the censorship regime in apartheid South Africa? Especially when a current survey of Coetzee’s work says that ‘it is a measure of his subtlety that none of his books have been banned in South ...”