“... care their pattern fits together.’ For an amusing American view I recall the patrician old lady from the Deep South who persisted to the end of the first quarter of the novel and then handed it back with a haughty: ‘I can only conclude that this novel was written by a congenital idiot.’ Tot homines ... However, if nobody can safely be dogmatic ...”

“... of life at the court of Charles II. It was often less than thrilling – ‘21 June, 1653. My Lady Gerrard, and one Esquire Knight, a very rich gentleman, living in Northamptonshire, visited me’; ‘23 June, 1653. Mr Lombart, a famous graver, came to see my collections’ – but was a commercial success nevertheless and reissued throughout the 19th ...”

“... in love, the woman she will later install in a White House bedroom across from her own. The First Lady’s passionate attachment to her woman friend has cooled, however, supplanted by her feelings for a radical student leader young enough to be her son. When the President’s wife meets her young man at a Chicago hotel during his furlough from the Army, the ...”

“... Russes on Bloomsbury was enormous and lasting. Omega’s first major commission came in 1913, from Lady Hamilton, whose niece worked for Diaghilev, and who, in Judith Collins’s words, wanted to turn her own home into ‘the approximation of a stage-set for a Diaghilev ballet’. The influence of the Ballets Russes went much deeper than décor, however. As ...”

“... the same century, but if one inserts a few writers between them the journey from The Portrait of a Lady to The Portrait of the Artist doesn’t seem very long. Still, times have changed since the Modernists pulled the well-worn carpet from beneath the feet of the Victorians. Back then, it seemed that the old guard yielded to the avant only when the former had ...”

“... Tolstoy. The great pleasure of seeing Chekhov develop as a writer, from ‘The Steppe’ to ‘The Lady with the Dog’ 11 years later, is to see the way he discovers and enlarges this idea of apparently arbitrary detail. For it is not merely Chekhov’s characters who think in sudden lunges and bites of detail. It is the principle of Chekhov’s whole ...”

“... a Renaissance prince framed in a vending machine, a baby doll in a forest of twigs, a painted lady in a French hotel, marbles among the stars and ballerinas in the sky – each box a dreamed universe or fantasised cohabitation.Joseph Cornell spent most of his life at 3708 Utopia Parkway in Queens, a plain middle-class house where he lived with his widowed ...”

“... many children Shakespeare had than it has with untheorised speculations about the number born to Lady Macbeth, it has nonetheless been prepared to look afresh at the relations between the plays and their different historical and cultural milieux. Shakespeare: A Life is thus enriched not only by recent studies of the biographical archive (notably David ...”

“... and by the stranglement of what appears to have been a long Platonic affair with a married court lady, Frau von Stein. He longs to travel in Italy, a journey he has often imagined, and which he postponed when he came to Weimar. Finally, in 1786, he asks for and is given a leave of absence and takes off for the better part of two years, visiting ...”

“... a compliant member of a boy band, he is lonely and lovelorn, and longs only to find a nice young lady and settle down. He’s also politically aware, frequently delivering loud, save-the-planet platitudes and shouting about human rights. But there is something else in Tennant’s Doctor, flickering beneath the charm: a deeper melancholy, an imprisonment, the ...”

“... gaze.’ Or: ‘Ah, what a dear, wonderful man he is: modest and mild-mannered, just like a young lady! Why, he even walks like a young lady. What a marvel he is!’) At this moment, in 1900, almost all the realists were dead: Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Flaubert, George Eliot, the Goncourt brothers, Maupassant. Zola was about to ...”

“... Album (1973), a book they wrote together, a sceptic might remark that the poem ‘Learning-Lady’ (which begins ‘I sprained my wrist taking her skirt off’) shows little interest in female intellectualism except for the purpose of an erotic joke; yet few could deny the alertly orgasmic profusion of ‘Coming-...”

“... in his enthusiasm was an earlier staple in his reading, the deeds of bold knights of chivalry. Our Lady the Mother of God became the object of his chivalric devotion, and once he was able to limp along the roads of Spain, he sought her in prayer during a whole night spent before her image in her shrine at Montserrat, outside Barcelona. So far not much else was ...”

“... his wife died he had set only one goal for himself: to turn his daughter into a great lady.’ Surprise, surprise. ‘The road was long and uncertain for a mule trader who did not know how to read or write and whose reputation as a horse thief was not so much proven as widespread.’ He turns out, in fact, to be no mere horse thief but an ...”

“... Goneril. An emotional entanglement leaves her ‘exactly in the condition of Lord Hardy and Lady Charlotte in The Funeral’ (by Steele). Her rift with the theatre manager Fleetwood is glossed over with a quote from Peachum. Even in moments of trauma, her sense of theatre is uppermost. Returning home one night to find her baby daughter in convulsive ...”