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“... world, the great painter will be said to paint himself in every portrait. The exquisite old lady reading in a pool of light holds the stillness of Rembrandt himself as he paints, and Velasquez looks back at us through the eyes of a court dwarf. This self-involvement may all the more readily be found in literature since most poets tend to be experts on ...”

“... off her chair. Duff Cooper’s philanderings are often quite funny. Having rekindled an old flame, Lady Warrender, he adjourns with her to his Gower Street house, now emptied of furniture and up for sale. Suddenly, while they’re at it, there’s a loud banging on the door downstairs which Duff Cooper eventually has to answer and it’s the estate agent with ...”

“... board, fads as I thought even as a boy of ten, picked up from Miss Thompson, a herbalistic lady living in the Hallidays who used to give Dad burdock and suchlike ‘for his blood’. 21 February. On the 100th anniversary of his birth a lot of tosh being talked about Auden as poet of Cumbria. Auden couldn’t have inhabited his ideal landscape, however ...”

“... find them underneath their tucks and ruffles. The firm got a splendid boost when the milk-maidenly Lady Diana Spencer’s rich charms were photographed showing through a windblown and backlit Laura Ashley skirt, just on the eve of her transformation into Princess-of-Wales-elect. The Laura Ashley style of dress offered sharp visual contrast to the simple ...”

“... He travelled widely, including yearly visits to both England (he was a friend of the salonnière Lady Cecil) and Karlsbad (his brother Albert had married into the Jewish élite of Vienna). From 1867 to 1869, he lived in New York, where he married the beautiful impoverished daughter of an American dentist, a marriage which ended disastrously when his wife was ...”

“... men. No doubt they were; but tender pink faces are by no means limited in the Frozen North to lady visitors, who usually come either in the form of faithful squaws or broken blossoms. Although ‘Even Unto Death’ is one of London’s feeblest stories, it demonstrates the odd and winning openness of his literary persona: he is never at all shy about his ...”

“... In the melee at my inner suburban polling-booth we were marshalled by a sergeant-majorly black lady, and voting instructions were pasted up in 22 languages other than English. The present rate of economic growth is just enough to hold unemployment where it is. Labour has to catch up on the environment and on sustainable development, to fund those election ...”

“... Sir Archibald when forty years later Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the Senior Treasury Counsel against Lady Chatterley, was still getting his in a twist about the possible evil effects of the book on his wife and servants. Compared with Hug-Hellmuth’s own biography, A Young Girl’s Diary is tame as tame can be. Grete Lainer – a pseudonym, in accordance with ...”

“... irritating about this presentation of the past as a giant Miss Universe pageant, with a lady-pleasing subsection for dishy gents, is that tucked away within it, and relatively unexplored, are some interesting propositions. One of them Professor Marwick puts with, I trust, calculated banality: ‘if it was a woman’s duty to be beautiful, could a ...”

“... had eight children, one of whom married Stanford White’s only child Lawrence. This Chanler lady, if you remember, became ‘Mama’ – Lessard’s grandmother with the second-generation liquid jewel/wine face. The Chanlers were amusing and artistic as well as classy. Some were painters, sculptors and musicians; all could write a sonnet at the drop of ...”

“... take it or leave it. That’s what shows in Frank O’Hara’s great poem of 1959, ‘The Day Lady Died’, when he buys himself a hamburger and a malted and ‘an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days’. Subsequently, foreign titles had something of the status of evidence, or alibi: an increasingly mendacious and ...”

“... chiefly those of Kipling and James, as well as (almost inevitably, one feels) Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ and James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. Hardy, Hemingway and Lawrence are given some close attention, too, and so is Elizabeth Bowen’s only famous story, ‘Mysterious Kôr’. At one point Bayley remarks, almost in incidental ...”

“... including some juxtapositions of a Church of Ireland bishop with a stotious boarding-house lady which might have fitted into The Old Boys, or The Boarding-House. Trevor’s precisions and indirections are impressively matched in David Profumo’s Sea Music, a first novel which restricts itself to a summer holiday in the early Fifties (a few years ...”

“... people in Hollywood on the hurtfulness in the South of a maid being referred to as ‘a coloured lady’. The polite thing was to call her ‘a coloured maid’. Bessie, the Faithful Bessie of Margaret Mitchell’s household, was Ever-Faithful and didn’t mind at all about the Klu Klux Klan on account of Miz Peggy being so busy. As to the peculiar method of ...”

“... but one is not quite sure how much these assessments of character have been influenced by Lady Falkender’s guide and mentor. In seeking to assess Tony Benn’s potential as a future Labour prime minister, she writes that his fantasy concerns the rule of the ordinary man but an ordinary man transformed into a superhuman of sparkling ...”