“... cadenza on ‘spooning’, is oddly prophetic of his metaphoric excursuses on intercourse in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, except that it is subversive of its theme. Having taken Emmy home, Gilbert then ‘goes too far’ in the greenhouse; is interrupted by Emmy’s Dickensian father, but escapes. When Mr Bostock discovers who the seducer is, he sends a ...”

“... Augusta Leigh, and contemplating (over a game of billiards) the seduction of the chaste Lady Frances Wedder-burn Webster, while he confided in Lady Melbourne, suavest of older women, about both. The love of women hardly bothers Byron in his last months. His messages even to Teresa Guiccioli, the last ...”

“... literature. Any self-respecting student can tell you what King Lear’s madness was all about, or Lady Macbeth’s, or even Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ (true madness or feigned?). But I have ransacked the resources of Freud and Jung, cognitive and transactional therapists, Gestaltists, not to mention a highly pragmatic member of the ...”

“... Cassandra bequeathed the scant batch of letters she had saved from the flames to her grand-niece, Lady Knatchbull, whose son, Lord Brabourne, had them published – like precious relics – in 1884. A number of other letters have surfaced since then; the great Austen scholar, R.W. Chapman, issued the first modern edition of the correspondence in ...”

“... to the sanctity of the Aran Islands and the Blasket Islands in Ireland. The attempt by Yeats and Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde to surround the Gaelic past with holiness had loud echoes in the efforts by Catalan architects and artists, from Gaudí to Miró, to establish the Romanesque tradition as quintessentially Catalan while the rest of Spain was ...”

“... history! The low-minded ruffian!’ His final phrase taunts Forrest in terms borrowed from Lady Macbeth: ‘That man would commit a murder, if he dare.’ Newspapers on both sides of Hadrian’s Wall, and soon on both sides of the Atlantic, were full of the affair for weeks. Three years later, when Macready embarked on a protracted farewell tour of the ...”

“... too . . . Tears were streaming down our faces but we were just about under control when a lady in the audience said: ‘Ahh, those two must have been really fond of him.’ That our mirth had been mistaken for grief had never occurred to us, and I’m afraid we began to howl with laughter. The audience watched us with deep sympathy. Maria stared ahead ...”

“... to new material and a reduced fear of libel. Of the seven children of David and Sydney, Lord and Lady Redesdale, six were girls; the Mitford industry revolves, lighthouse-like, between them. Nancy, the novelist, wit and Bright Young Thing, comes to prominence whenever her books are dramatised; Unity and Diana, the Nazis, are subjects for studies of British ...”

“... extraordinary outburst young(ish) Milton inserted into his aristocratic masque Comus, in which the Lady (sometimes seen as a self-portrait of the chaste and serious Milton) attacks the enchanter Comus:If every just man that now pines with wantHad but a moderate and beseeming shareOf that which lewdly-pampered LuxuryNow heaps upon some few with vast ...”

“... an odd crew: an Australian journalist with troubles on the domestic front, an eccentric British lady of means who wants to stamp out female circumcision, a morose American aid worker and a young French girl in search of her father, a network cameraman, who long ago went missing to work in the hills with the rebels. (The last character is based on the ...”

“... underscore the anatomy rather than hide it’. Well, yes, one did not have to be an aristocratic lady to notice that. Another omission from these pages is any discourse on the subject of T-shirts boasting slogans, advertisements, names of bogus universities, jokes and obscenities. The author mentions the way in which designers took to applying their labels ...”

“... of essays on Rivière, and edited by Foucault). And, in an article entitled ‘Quietly, the First Lady builds a literary room of her own’ in the New York Times, Laura Bush assured the nation that ‘there’s nothing political about American literature.’ It’s pretty startling for us fledglings down here, feet on the ground in the real ...”

“... do is to imagine someone who is not me, though not someone I know, being 50. She looks like an old lady; the way old ladies currently look. She looks like someone else. I can’t connect me thinking about her with the fact that I will be her in 41 years’ time. She has lived through and known 41 years to which I have no access. I can’t believe I will become ...”

“... tradition and brings to mind the bemusement of the 18th-century Turkish ladies on discovering Lady Mary Wortley-Montague’s corsets and their conviction that these corsets were a kind of overall chastity belt into which her husband had padlocked her before he allowed her to leave England. Ms Johnson has plenty of good ‘foreign’ stuff: the humbly-born ...”

“... or no, the dictionary is not a book of morals. Winchester records Dr Johnson’s riposte to the lady who noted his omission of obscenities; but British prudery kept cunt and fuck (though not piss, which was biblically sanctified, or shit) out of not only the OED but all other general dictionaries until Burchfield’s A-G volume of 1972, though fifty years ...”