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“... book carry with it the occupational hazards of seeing his plays, such as finding the redoubtable Lady Redgrave looming over one ready to box one’s ears, as she did to a vociferous member of the audience of A Sense of Detachment. The book as a form is safe, even cosy, and I suspect that critics, who have given Osborne such a consistently hard time for so ...”

“... family in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, she narrates the scene with gleeful wit:‘Jesus,’ the old lady cried. ‘You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady. I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the money I’ve ...”

“... amount about Caroline and her behaviour, did not. It seems that George’s current mistress, Lady Jersey, had some say in the matter, and the news that the prospective bride was neither especially good-looking nor refined did not apparently displease her at all. From the beginning there were at least three people in this marriage, and at times as many as ...”

“... who are fated to hear it. The best of Lee’s stories, however, is ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’, in which a young boy’s fairy godmother, Oriana, has been condemned to take the form of a grass snake until she can find a lover trusting enough to kiss her fangs. She is hacked to pieces by the lackeys of Alberic’s jealous uncle and Alberic dies of ...”

“... interest groups, her hymn of praise seems embarrassingly obsequious. In accordance with it, Lady Thatcher adopts the full American line on Iraq and the Middle East. She even calls Israel ‘our ally’, although Israel is America’s ally but not Britain’s. Syria is deemed ‘obdurate’ for insisting on regaining all her territory that Israel has ...”

“... he gets down to business, so that within a scene the play is at full gallop. No messing about with Lady M. either. No sooner does she learn Duncan is going to visit than she decides on the murder. Oddities are Macduff’s abandonment of wife and family in order, seemingly, to save his own skin, though the scene in which his wife is discussing this with Ross is ...”

“... keepsake, nothing more. You’ve changed the ‘loan perpetual’ to a bequest by dying. Augusta, Lady Blanche, Lord Ravenstone – I’ve read the lot, trying to gel to sleep. The jokes have all gone flat. I can’t stop ...”

“... de Paris on Coventry Street. (This is not her territory in the movie itself. She plays an old lady who lets a room on Goodge Street to our heroine.) Rigg enjoyed the visit and recalled going to the real Café de Paris on her eighteenth birthday to hear Shirley Bassey. There was something else, though: ‘I remember walking down those stairs and a lot of ...”

“... Barnby enlivening a portrait session much as Henry Lamb did when he enlisted his sister-in-law, Lady Violet Pakenham, to talk to Powell while he was being painted. Lamb’s portraits – of Powell, of Lady Violet, of Evelyn Waugh – are the most assured and historically significant in the exhibition. Perhaps there is ...”

“... Valérie Trierweiler​ ’s book about her life as a grande Hollandaise and France’s first lady, and then – abruptly – neither of those, is more hair-raising than the extracts in Paris Match suggested when they appeared on the eve of publication at the beginning of September. Her pain levels are out of control; rage, jealousy, self-pity, self-flattery and malice are the indices, on every page ...”

“... that they tell next to nothing about what people really wore. One can believe that when Venetia, Lady Digby came to van Dyck’s studio to pose as Prudence she brought her own white shift and pearls; her voluminous cloaks, on the other hand, surely came from the studio prop box (if not from imagination). But in van Dyck’s portraits, as in Rubens’s ...”

“... of what Ma sees, but with the murderer carefully left out, or never put in. There is an ageing lady by a river. We look at her confronting some geese, then at her head from the back, at an axe or heavy knife in close-up, at the police examining the murder scene. Later we see a man walking by the river; then his glance at the camera, which may mean, within ...”

“... to a younger, female relation. But since the American Constitution does not prescribe what a First Lady can or cannot do, there was nothing to stop Woodrow Wilson’s wife from moving in on his office when he was incapacitated by a stroke from 1919 to 1921. ‘I studied every paper sent from the different Secretaries or Senators,’ Mrs Wilson, the former ...”

“... reader of Twenties biographies, it would be no hard job to identify Lord Foppington’s friends my Lady Tattle, my Lady Prate, my Lady Titter and my Lady Leer. Comedy could also be right for another reason: the point about Stephen Tennant is that he kept ...”

“... The masters of this kind of narrative draw no attention to it at all. In Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’ the pair have met, found themselves making love, and then taken a cab along the sea-front and sat on a bench together in the dawn. Yalta was barely visible through the dawn mist; white clouds hung motionless on the mountain peaks. Not a leaf ...”