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“... 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 ...”

“... excessively strange as when blackthorn blossom turns into ‘the frock on a dark, small, angular lady’. Straining a bit for effect? No doubt, but outrageous metaphor like this keeps you alert. Les Murray is a rarity, a poet with a gift of the gab used not for self-regarding rhetoric but for storytelling, a man writing with unstrained and often moving ...”

“... wrapped in red, yellow, green or blue silk. As a child, Josephine identifies with an Atwoodian fat lady tightrope-walker she sees at a fair, a ‘ridiculous and touching figure’, with ‘the courage to be more than herself, not held back by fear or gravity, twirling herself so delicately into dangerous space’. But when Josephine reads the forbidden red ...”

“... the motionless statues, tramps asleep ‘like litter on the grass’, a de la Mareish old, old lady that nobody knows and a young man who is not quite right in the head. Though he wrote, with great facility, plays, epitaphs, harlequinades, Humbert Wolfe is most himself in the tiny Georgian lyric which turns so adroitly to satire. He took a risk here, as he ...”

“... In London, too, ‘drink is a great problem,’ Hamnett writes in her second memoir, Is She a Lady? Fry and Sickert told her to slow down, work hard, not get too ‘distracted’ (i.e. drunk). But she thrived in these spaces, and her writing is full of the kinds of incident and encounter that would never have occurred in the other spheres available to her ...”

“... she’d discovered. I’m not sure about Polar Stampede. Assault on the Solar Plexus ditto. Happy Lady, by contrast, is exquisite pictorial comedy with title to match. I was dreading finding the big 1960s paintings overblown – ‘big statements’. Bad reproductions and worse recollections of canvases like Polar Stampede littered my mind. The real things ...”

“... up and down steep hills, to listen to the singing of Amy Shuard; and the portrait of a beloved old lady, a sexy mother-figure, German by origin, who returns to Germany just before the war breaks out and of whose death in an Allied bombing-raid the narrator learns in circumstances which are peculiarly tormenting to him. And finally there is the undoing of ...”