“... Things look bad for the United Kingdom when its female Prime Minister – perhaps to become the Lady Finchley later alluded to – gives way to Dr Charon. The events narrated take place approximately ten years hence. The ‘papers’ are variously the records of Oi Paz himself, official reports, newspaper cuttings and, in particular, the field notes and ...”

“... Sapper or Buchan than they do to Freud. D.H. Lawrence is reproved for squeamishly supposing that Lady Ottoline’s cervix was sharp enough to lacerate him. ‘Now, if this had been physically true, any man capable of blowing his own nose and fond of the woman could have handled it, I suggest, by wearing plasticine under a French letter.’ The remarks about ...”

“... slave trade. The smitten reader willingly confuses the writer with the writing. Having read ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, Browning declares in his first letter to Elizabeth Barrett: ‘I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart – and I love you too.’ Those rare, and usually misbegotten, occasions when the reader and writer approach each ...”

“... look, fancy that, they used to be at university together, you know.’ It was the name of the lady principal of Somerville College, Oxford, Daphne Park, who has, we read here, a history of an elusive kind in Zambia and the Congo. One or two of the other names on the list I had already come across personally, in a similarly disconcerting way. I remember ...”

“... limbs of steel ... a one-armed soldier using his good hand to salute a heavily bemedalled lady who had just passed him a biscuit; a colonel, his fly wide open, embracing a nurse ... a skeleton dressed up as a recruit taking a medical’. The descriptions alone give some notion of why this work, and the more politically overt drawings of the post-war ...”

“... out of date.’ ‘Tea with Mrs Bittell’ chronicles the relationship between a rich, lonely old lady and a young homosexual shop assistant; like other recent stories with elderly protagonists, it also quietly charts collisions of period and class, and shows a keen, wry sense of the displacements worked by social change and old age. Sidney’s understanding ...”

“... coiffeured John Bond (I was gratified the other day by a newspaper reference to Bond’s ‘Lady Di’ hair-do – surely, after that, he’ll get it cropped?). Bond has described himself on television as ‘flamboyant’, which he seems to think has something to do with champagne, cigars, sheepskin, Malcolm Allison and ‘being myself, I can’t help ...”

“... the publication in ten years’ time of a spate of works of self-justification: Not One of Us by Lady Grantham, Going Down with the Ship by Sir Ian Gilmour, The Non-Playing Captain of the Wets by Lord Whitelaw and The Broken Reed by Messrs Sherman and Strauss. We shall have to wait until Willie tells the story of his encounter with Margaret in a room behind ...”

“... Ms Jong abandoned in the mid-1960s. There is clearly a market for this kind of thing. ‘Another Lady’ and yet another personage have presumably made substantial sums with their pedestrian efforts to complete two of Jane Austen’s unfinished novels, Sanditon and The Watsons. Georgette Heyer, imitating no one in particular, for years kept a faithful ...”

“... enough to criticise her poetry, irresistibly recalls another Edith – Edith Evans playing Lady Bracknell. But there is always the possibility that the richly comic side of these scenes was not wholly unintended, that the affronted dignity was deliberately pushed to the edge of the absurd. And then a very different picture comes to mind – the pathos ...”

“... united to honour her,’ he wrote; ‘the aristocracy of letters gathered round the gentle lady, who was justly esteemed the most illustrious figure that has arisen in literature since Goethe died.’ Queen Victoria’s daughters, eager to meet her, even arranged to have the Leweses invited to dinner parties, one of which Dean Stanley himself ...”

“... for her mother has slipped off to Mozambique with a Portuguese. One of the aunts is a cultivated, lady-like matron with no political interests. The other is a keen advocate of African rights, married to an urgent lawyer: they send their son to school in an independent African state, to humanise him, but they know he will be conscripted into the South African ...”

“... seamen parodying the dances of their betters. A love affair begins between our hero and a young lady aboard the frigate. The guilty officer is silently exchanged for a handsome young fellow who has been having to do with the wife of the frigate’s captain; he becomes an important figure in the continuing story. But all these developments are related to the ...”

“... venting of pique will become clear when the new franchises start up in January. Once the lady had been unhorsed, however, the steam seemed to go out of the relationship. Early in the Gulf War, John Major was invited by one of his more neanderthal backbenchers to indulge in a routine spot of BBC-bashing during Prime Minister’s Questions in the ...”

“... destroy all one’s judgment – turn one into an ape.’ For an upper-middle-class young lady, born in the reign of Victoria, these were unusual sentiments. Song of Love provides a much clearer picture of Noel’s character than could be seen in the documents previously available. She told Rupert that when she was a child Edward Garnett had looked ...”