“... advised him to do some reading over the summer in preparation for his teaching), and another lady, Sylva Norman, whose literary ambitions he assisted. Teaching was as much a success in Oxford as it had been in Japan: he got on with his pupils and took great trouble over them. Divorced and remarried, he settled down happily, acquiring a reputation as a ...”

“... happy work situation for herself by going to sit and talk for a number of hours a day with an old lady in shelter care. She loved that, and then home for a bath and supper. ‘What’s on the box? Not a lot. On the radio? Not a lot. Right, get out your book.’ Mrs Bright’s resources, like those of a surprising number of retired people, had no truck with ...”

“... own name. Chamfort was the illegitimate son of Jacqueline de Vinzelles, an aristocratic married lady from the region of Clermont-Ferrand, and a young canon at the cathedral. He was dumped on a baker’s wife, whose own baby had died, and given the dead baby’s name: Sebastien Roch Nicolas. Brilliant as a schoolboy, tormented by rage and resentment when he ...”

“... seven young men named Snowball, which started a giggle that swiftly died away. Having read about Lady Ottoline and Garsington young Barry decided to become a conscientious objector, which to his great surprise rather impressed the grim headmaster, Mr Sutcliffe, and resulted in our hero’s being able to stroll past rigid platoons of classmates, ‘their ...”

“... and similar impossibles’, but then he was writing to Aunt Laura, who was reading Portrait of a Lady and may have indicated that the going was getting rough. In Aspects of the Novel (1927) Forster gave several pages to The Ambassadors, and showed that he thought it quite possible but stingy – an instance of James’s premise, according to Forster’s ...”

“... tenderly, or drily. Julia watches a bloody duel fought over her, with the courteous interest of a lady at a medieval tournament, from what appears, surreally, to be the window of a public bathhouse. This puzzling scene provides a turning-point to the drama, for it is followed by the one drawing of a tête-à-tête between the lovers – a misnomer, since her ...”

“... a Jewish husband, ‘hates’ Israel.And of course Trump had to bring up the cats. Vance’s cat lady crack wasn’t going away, so the Republicans had demonstrated their cat-loving credentials by creating the completely false story that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing cats off the front porches of real Americans and eating them. This ...”

“... Nancy said to me after the show as we waited for an armed guard to escort us to her car. ‘Lady, you have balls!’ In New York the next morning, I ended the tour with an appearance on Crossfire, a public-affairs programme on which two antagonists duke it out, each with her very own hostile interviewer; as a friend remarked, it’s like being locked in ...”

“... we are told, relished the company of sophisticated old ladies and he had an unbounded esteem for Lady Tennyson, as well as ‘adoring’ her children. He made a point of cultivating his friends’ wives. It is possible he remained a bachelor because of his epileptic attacks (which he covered up well), or even because of the maladie d’ amour he picked up as ...”

“... objects – a guinea for the King and a Jew’s harp for the bishop – while beside them a lady and gentleman, or rather a teapot and a periwig, engage in a tête à tête. This, Uglow points out, is still the language of the emblem book, where images stand, hieratically, for ideas. By 1762, in Five Orders of Periwigs, the process is reversed, objects ...”

“... As Brophy does not point out, such sentiments are reserved, in novels, to wicked women, such as Lady Bellaston and Roxana. One of the drawbacks of Brophy’s collection of evidence is that she is sticking entirely to the middle class. Yet within the range of the middle class, too, she prefers the upper or genteel end, and we get relatively few glimpses of ...”

“... and the salaries of the executives concerned.This was written a few hours before I learned of Lady Thatcher’s death and it’s an appropriate epitaph. 17 April. Shots of the cabinet and the ex-cabinet at Lady Thatcher’s funeral in St Paul’s just emphasise how consistently cowardly most of them were, the only time ...”

“... to be his selection, more than once, as host of a swan dinner for the Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady. Useful basic networking. Father and grandfather had been Brothers before him. Painting was the family business: eleven men called Bosch, through five generations, are titled ‘painters’ in the archive. We have a single surviving contract for a major ...”

“... process grew no more transparent as he aged: ‘The story came as it did, by itself,’ he said of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ‘so I left it alone.’ He loathed novelists like Flaubert, whom he conceived to be control freaks, and whose books were ‘carefully plotted and arranged developments’, quite lacking the crucial quality he called ...”

“... and though the last thing he wants is any sort of hold-up (‘“God damn you, lady,” my grandfather said’), he can’t ignore her, stand-up guy that he is. A number of pets have gone missing, as it turns out, and a predator is suspected. In Florida an alligator is an obvious possibility, but Devaughn, the village’s night ...”