“... out of date.’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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... about his non-payment of a very small loan, and next he makes a highly aristocratic marriage to a lady twenty years older than himself. Medlicott’s avatars are amusing enough, yet do not really strike us as leading anywhere, and this is an example of an important law. High talent in autobiography (whether fictional or of the real-life kind) shows itself in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the country. On the Tel Aviv seashore, private yachts share the sea with armed patrols. ‘Lady, you’re in a closed military zone,’ a guard mutters, when I stray beyond an elegant new marina. In shabby downtown Jerusalem, by contrast, there are two guards for every bus: one at the stop, one on the bus itself. Many restaurants have barricades around ...”

“... by Scott on sale in the giftshop at Loch Katrine, once universally famous as the domain of The Lady of the Lake. The contrast at the heart of Watson’s book is between Abbotsford, the showcase that Scott constructed to exhibit himself, and Haworth Parsonage, home of the Brontës, which ‘dramatises female authorship as unsuccessful to the point of ...”

“... to be congratulated on writing extensively about gamekeepers without even a passing reference to Lady Chatterley’s Lover (notoriously inadequate in its coverage of a keeper’s daily duties). It emerges shyly on page 149 that in 1996 the author was presented by a visitor from Australia with a fine gold-plated Ace rabbit trap in recognition of his interest ...”

“... than be hunted by mankind until trapped and put in a cage for a young lady to admire: For whan fair freedom smiles nae mair, Care I for life? Shame fa the hair; A field o’ergrown wi rankest stubble, The essence of a paltry bubble. This willingness to toss away life itself in the face of corralling and compromise is evident in ...”