“... 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 ...”

“... a long moustache and a Van Dyke beard, smoking an opium pipe. Above my left breast I got a naked lady, a rear view of her squatting, but that one faded. And then on my back I got a chick doing the limbo, going under the bar, with little black panties on. That one came out nice. Just before I got released, I was going to get a vampire. A guy had done a ...”

“... rings my agent Rosalind Chatto to tell her that when in last year’s LRB diary I quote an old lady in New York as saying ‘I zigged when I should have zagged’ the original remark came from the American sports reporter Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old ...”

“... the kilt matches the Havana wrapper perfectly. Here are some samples. Ladies first. ‘Advice to a Lady’ is a poem in which Padilla, like a Cuban Sexus Propertius, or rather a political Ovid, gives her cue to a lady from the Cuban haute bourgeoisie, reluctant to vanish, on how to behave improperly, according to the new ...”

“... the most significant of his day, such as Eliot and Lawrence. In 1962 he dined with Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley in Paris, ‘and was much taken with them’, on his way to spending three weeks in the USSR – where his novels sold in hundreds of thousands – as the guest of the Writer’s Union. ‘This is the happiest day of my life,’ he said at the ...”

“... and seductive war widows fail to wean Louis from his obsession with Madame Laura, the local ‘hot lady’ whose stolen panties he won from a friend as a result of a bet over the timing of the German invasion. There are other things here which might suggest the earthier and homelier version of L’Education Sentimentale, though in The Sorrow of Belgium Louis ...”

“... rules of seduction, he says, with ‘two exceptions. I never deflower and I do not persist if the lady doesn’t want me.’ Regarding one of these statements the present writer’s recollection is slightly different. And then, of course, there is the wine. The reader can learn a good deal about its production and the internecine politics of the growers. But ...”

“... For the Wodehouse archive he is assembling, Edward Cazalet, grandson of the 99-year-old widowed Lady Wodehouse, recently bought, for £175, a short ts. letter from Wodehouse to a Mr Slater, dated 2 July 1953. Mr Slater had asked Wodehouse where Market Blandings was, the station for the Castle, with Jno Robinson’s taxi waiting to rattle you up to the home ...”

“... want. In the series of letters exchanged between Benjamin Disraeli and Frances Anne Vane-Tempest, Lady Londonderry (known as ‘Vane’) there’s an unexplained hiatus. A silence, beginning in 1839, the year of Disraeli’s marriage, and persisting until 1845, overtook the correspondence. Now the gap, on Disraeli’s side at least, is factitiously ...”