“... 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 ...”

“... both with women – Minny Temple, who inspired the heroines of Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady, and the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose tangled intimacy with James provoked some of his most celebrated short stories. Like his sister Alice, Tóibín says, James ‘recoiled from engagements, deep companionship, the warmth of love’. But while ...”

“... on endlessly about their childhoods, and then goes on about her own. She reads The Portrait of a Lady and wonders about the difference between biography and autobiography, and why novels have to be about other people’s lives, not the writer’s own. (‘Isabel, who had had the experiences, hadn’t written a book; Henry James, who had written the ...”

“... in Britain: taciturn becapped old workers line up alongside bright young students. A middle-aged lady looks me directly in the eye and says: ‘We are a poor country but we love books.’ It is a straightforward statement, and not in the least mawkish. It is also true. At a meeting with editors from two of Bulgaria’s literary journals, I am unable to tell ...”

“... unfolds. When it is over, Cleopatra whispers in Charmian’s ear and Iras says: ‘Finish, good lady, the bright day is done, and we are for the dark.’ Cleopatra answers: ‘It is provided’, referring without question to the means of death. Given the drumbeat consistency of the references to the death-plan in counterpoint with the studied formality of ...”

“... married man which in my case I am not, you have your house and all the rest of it, though my young lady and me will be getting married very shortly. Then she will have everything she wants too, and she’s very ready to join the Army with me, as they say sir. Because if a man’s wife is not right for the Army, then that man is not right for the Army either. I ...”

“... she played ‘no role in the decisions that led to the worst crimes of the century’. Would a Lady Macbeth have been less ‘disappointing’? In contrast to Magda Goebbels and other true believers, Braun comes across as profoundly apolitical, even oblivious. She never joined the Nazi Party (but then Hitler wouldn’t let his sister join either). It ...”

“... her own house in Shanghai, and live a brisk and resolute life. Yvonne wanted to raise her to be a lady, and taught her to play the piano, to paint, to speak and write English. For young Eileen, smiling properly was especially hard. She failed every time, either laughing too loudly or not smiling at all. Yvonne also tried to teach her how to cook, how to wash ...”

“... the endless attentions to the Queen’s hair. The profession of ‘novelist’ did not exist for a lady, and Charles Burney had made his daughter abandon her potentially profitable comic drama, whose satire he thought would cause offence. So she had felt obliged to accept this post at Court, urged on by her father. Whenever the Queen’s bell rang (‘so ...”