“... 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 ...”

“... a discreet sniff at the chamber pot. If she had not fed him asparagus then perhaps some other lady had; for both sexes were convinced that the spruce vegetable possessed infallible aphrodisiac properties. Certainly it is a powerful diuretic, and gives an unmistakable and for many a not disagreeable odour to the urine (Proust’s ‘parfum’), but no more ...”

“... the helpful suggestions. ‘Why don’t you send a few to card manufacturers?’, ‘How about the Lady?’ or, ‘Do a little love story for Woman’s Own instead.’ That last one’s out. I don’t know anything about love (I’ve never progressed beyond lust) and I’m not the womanly type. I’ve tried to frighten them by saying I only write obscene ...”

“... and sometimes identify with death in a more enterprising sense (Jagger’s housekeeper Molly, or Lady Dedlock’s maid Mlle Hortense, who both turn out to be murderers). His narrative energies are closely bound up with his authority as preserver or destroyer of the lives he imagines. Like Nelly Dean, Dickens is seldom anything other than happy while watching ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But his book may help to explain how it was that, although he freely confessed his lust for a Dark Lady he didn’t much like and sometimes found almost ugly, Shakespeare could repudiate any homosexual interest in Sonnet 20, while remaining obsessed with a young man whose character also left much to be desired, but whose physical beauty he evidently found ...”

“... a little bit of a verbal battle and he wound up calling me a tyrant. What he did was to take this lady who ran the little apartment house in Las Vegas where Perry Smith [one of the killers] had been, and fictionalise her way out of character. Accuracy was not his point … It was probably an insignificant thing, except I was under the impression the book was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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. ...”