“... dramas’. Dr Crippen, a bespectacled, respectable man, who lived in North London, killed the lady, cut her up and buried her in the coal bunker. He then took up with his lover, a young thing called Ethel le Neve. Like many murders before and since, the one carried out by Dr Crippen came to be seen as a reflection on and of its time. All manner of local ...”

“... 703. I like the number – I am superstitious about them – for the zero in the middle is like a lady flanked by two gentlemen, one older and one younger.’ Dickens, and more acutely Gogol, may have influenced Roth, but probably the strongest impression was made by Viennese journalism, in particular the practice and perfection of the feuilleton, or short ...”

“... one reveals different things about oneself to different people. Even if one never lies, as a lady once said to me, one seldom tells the whole truth. And their own readings of his character, not surprisingly, in the light of their diverse backgrounds, viewpoints and talents, differ. Friends see friends as part of their own lives. Part of how we now see ...”

“... against Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of Melvin Douglas, who had been smeared as ‘the Pink Lady’). But he does mention Kennedy’s unfortunate excursions into foreign affairs when he was a member of Congress: for instance, he joined in the general caterwauling about Truman having lost China and made a number of insensitive attacks on ...”

“... the emotional pleas and purposes the poet wants to exhibit. The same thing happens even in ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’, where the skill of the art-work has become more durable than what it was supposed to be saying. Natural in a sense, therefore, that the new generation should detect what survives and identify with it. Sylvia Plath’s suicide and ...”

“... to some people about Proust, Cavafy, Caravaggio and Mozart; to others, about the Platters, The Lady Vanishes, St Elsewhere and Frazier. Taste can be criticised as surely as character can, but not every difference in character manifests a defect. Universal agreement on beauty would bring with it the desolation of uniformity, not the triumph of truth. Beauty ...”

“... numerous Harlem parties: ‘What a crowd! All classes and colours met face to face ... And yes, Lady Nancy Cunard was there all in black (she would) with 12 of her grand bracelets.’ Cunard made a collection of black writing, including some of the major names of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston among them, and published it under the title ...”

“... In St Jude’s Church, Hampstead Garden Suburb, designed by Lutyens and opened in 1911, the Lady Chapel enshrines a pantheon of women; in the west dome, St Joan has pride of place over an English heaven populated by a mixed bunch of writers, philanthropists and reformers – Cavell is there, and so are Queens Victoria and Alexandra, Elizabeth Barrett ...”

“... succession (The Big Sleep in 1939, Farewell, My Lovely in 1940, The High Window in 1942 and The Lady in the Lake in 1943), there was a gap of six years before The Little Sister appeared in 1949, reflecting Chandler’s other career as a screenwriter (he wrote The Blue Dahlia and shared credit for the adaptations of Strangers on a Train and Double ...”

“... 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 ...”