“... when he spent time in his flat on the rue du Bac. He moved between markets and languages – Lady L. (1958), The Talent Scout (1961), The Ski Bum (1965) and The Gasp (1973) were written in English – and dabbled unsuccessfully in writing plays as well as directing. His writing was slapdash as a matter of principle: ‘I hate works that are ...”

“... preoccupations. So the chapter on Henry James argues that Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady is ‘one of Emerson’s children’, who illustrates a drive for self-reliance at any cost. I’m not convinced that this claim gets any purchase on the dark intricacies of James’s Americoeuropean world, with its intimate interdependencies, invisibly ...”

“... consumption, the arranged marriages, sense of family dynasties, assumption of the role of Lady Bountiful, adoption of royalist policies and of particular kinds of religious observance. Hence, too, an obsession with etiquette that was all the more punctilious because they were not very sure of themselves. No doubt there was much more to it than ...”

“... and we might have been. But it may all have been romance; in private life Beatrice Lillie was Lady Peel and my aunties even adduced her as a distant connection. The mill gone, my grandparents bought a hardware shop in West Vale outside Halifax but that too went bankrupt, through sheer kind-heartedness my mother said, and letting too much stuff out on ...”

“... inflation. Templer and Duport, Mona and Quiggin, Mrs Erdleigh and Mr Deacon, General Conyers and Lady Molly, not to speak of Widmerpool or Stringham, speak in expressive voices that, even at the more exotic end of the spectrum, never strain belief; in more vernacular idiom, the exchanges between Albert, Billson and Bracey at Stonehurst have little in common ...”

“... all reference I am taxed with “injustice”. If I make a pointed reference, as I did in “Our Lady of the Snows”, I am ... supposed to be scaring away immigrants by misrepresenting the climate of the Dominion.’ In 1889, when he was crossing the United States and reporting on his travels to his Indian papers, he took some liberties with his ...”

“... not to distress ladies. ‘Goodwife’ smyth, however, was perhaps not under class-protection as lady, damsel or gentlewoman. In which case one can credit Sir Thomas, man and author, with consistent chivalry, at the same time noting that this ‘chivalry’ applied only to the upper ranks of society, protecting them from casual outrage – but also exposing ...”

“... survive: ‘omit galvanic instruments and hands’, ‘remove poodle and chair’. The mad lady with the exploding hair is given a furrowed brow, absent in the original photograph, retrieved by Ekman from the archives and published here. The mewling infant on Plate 1 was photographed, engraved, retouched and finally re-photographed. (That photograph ...”

“... happier than when after high tea (he loathed High Table) he could read to or with a sympathetic lady or two, make jokes, be mildly flirtatious. Rhoda Broughton, the spinster novelist who lived with her sister in Holywell, was a vivacious and reliable guest until they quarrelled, not because she had put him into Belinda – he rather liked that, and ...”

“... Thirties the morbid Joynson-Hicks was for ever having books seized by the Police – Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were but two of the kind of thing he was after. David Low portrayed him as a funeral mute with thick crêpe on his hat. Even that little classic The Specialist was a cause of some anxiety at Putnam, and a sigh of relief went up when the ...”

“... father (after she revealed the hidden six-shooter): ‘You’ve got yourself one helluva little lady there.’ Later, Nichols herself stands up to the Mob while working as a showgirl (‘You got class, kid’). Forthright on both race and gender issues, she insists on prosecuting and sending down a prominent lawyer for attempted rape (‘when a woman says ...”

“... all our faults, we love our Queen’ – but Munich encourages us to think of Victoria when Lady Jane laments the ‘spreading’ of her ‘figure trim’ in Patience, or when The Mikado’s extravagant mourner, Katisha, makes imperial claims for her ‘circulation’ as ‘the largest in the world’. If such sightings of Victoria risk ‘taking ...”

“... respectable writings of the day. ‘Made up your mind, lovebird? – Yes ... I’ll have the fat lady in pink, the one with the crinoline.’ This is prostitution without the usual 19th-century trappings of mystery and romance. Corbière himself was quite familiar with ‘l’amour à trente sous’; fat ladies in pink were the meagre solace of long ...”

“... Eggleby, ‘in a tone which had been thoroughly sterilised of even perfunctory regret’. And a Lady Caroline, bound for a play, threatens that if it contains any more brilliant conversation she will burst into tears. Those tedious country-house weekends, with the ever-present threat of the pianola and progressive halma played for milk chocolate, certainly ...”

“... bank. Nonetheless he is under Shakespeare’s spell. He falls for his sister’s lover, a Dark Lady called Petra, and is unwittingly trapped in a Shakespearean plot, a sort of Thirteenth Night, in which, pinned down by a beagle, he is seduced by Petra and so effectively conceives his sister’s child, while the sister apparently dies but doesn’t ...”