“... extraction, in conception (and in physique) somewhere between Callas and Caballé. The lady, who has been pursued for months by a malicious paparazzo, is found stabbed in the house of her fabulously rich protector (somewhere between Onassis and Mr Merdle) on a lake island in the South of New Zealand, after a performance of an opera by her protégé ...”

“... start by denying the fact was no more than the code of a gentleman then required: the honour of a lady might not be impugned, however dubious her claim to that status. To sue newspapers, as he did, for printing the truth was ill-judged and worse, but it followed necessarily from the original lie. To admit that lie in public and in Parliament, to resign seat ...”

“... taken by one of his many Hungarian hangers on. Alex was in his late fifties when he made Alexa, Lady Korda. She was in her early twenties, about five years older than Michael. What follows is the discreet but engaging story of an uneasy triangle in which all the parties come into sharp life. Alex should not have married again. He knew it, but he was lonely ...”

“... in part out of a need to make herself indispensable to them and to counter their criticism that ‘Lady Natasha’s nothing but a dilettante!’ Despite ‘those wonderfully intelligent eyes of his’ and his brilliance and originality as a political thinker – qualities we are required to take on trust – Senya is made an absurd figure as well as an ...”

“... is inevitably, but still unfortunately, scattered. The liveliest figure is Eurydike, a would-be Lady Macbeth 15 years old, who marries Alexander’s idiot brother and propels him upwards through a political career, leading ever larger mutinies in the armies; the other contenders are amazed, discomfited, she more than keeps them busy. But they are the ...”

“... Cornucopias of fruit and vegetables disgorge within a general herbaceousness. An ancient lady ‘yanked at some convolvulus that threatened to smother the phlox’. Indoors, ‘potted pelargoniums shed their yellowing leaves over the piles of pamphlets and Country Lifes. A budgie clawed at the bars of its cage; demijohns of home-made wine were busy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was indeed ruled by the wish not to change and to keep things as they are (shades of the Ricardian lady and her boar). I should never have dreamt of giving such a simple explanation myself, for fear of being accused of Gallocentrism. But I am beginning to wonder, now that my trip has been marked by a return to primary values, whether the explanation does not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in white. The pink stone steps of somebody’s pink stucco house, the oranges we ate with some lady.’ Therapy, like artistry, works best when its effects are everywhere present and nowhere visible; the lineaments of Hornbacher’s hours on the couch are a little too obvious. And the therapeutic process seems far from complete, which makes Wasted less ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... most are real: Lord Melchett (Morgan’s 19-year-old buddy), Lord Astor and his bride, Lord and Lady Duff Gordon, a Frick, a Vanderbilt, Mr and Mrs Straus who own Macy’s, and also Thomas Andrews, the architect of the Titanic, and Bruce Ismay, a White Star official. Real or fictional, they divide roughly into a group of young bloods and flappers, on the ...”

“... which sank into the sod like park-keepers’ spikes. The women were contenders in the Best-Dressed Lady competition (‘kindly sponsored by Brian de Staic’) and/or the Most Elegant Mother & Daughter event. I kept an unofficial book on the Best-Dressed Man handicap: my nap was a character in a five-gallon hat and red neckerchief. I had him in a double with 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 ...”