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“... on, when we revisit this scene, the interviewer says, ‘but it’s a war on drugs, not on you, Lady,’ and Holiday replies: ‘Yes, that’s what they want you to think.’ In the meantime, she has been arrested while singing ‘Strange Fruit’ and been convicted for possessing and shooting up heroin. She serves eleven months in a prison in West ...”

“... that gives any clue. However, just before the train arrives at Cardiff the very proper bourgeois lady takes out her compact and with her lipstick carefully draws the French flag on each cheek and on her forehead and colours them in. This is done so unselfconsciously and without a smile R. feels that for this alone they deserve to win. 25 April. At five a ...”

“... against them, discovered some twenty years ago by Isobel Grundy among the papers of his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Fielding seems to have been playing on Lady Mary’s hostility to Pope and his friends, and may have hoped through her influence to secure the patronage of the Prime Minister Walpole. There was no ...”

“... and involving two personalities as well as the poet’s: the ‘fair young man’ and the ‘dark lady’. For a very long time – this approach still dominates at least the more conservative or biographical criticism – the Sonnets have been read as telling some kind of love story, the objects a man and a woman (Sonnets 1-126, 127-152): and the far more ...”

“... quest’ for an American stage personality of the next generation, Adah Isaacs Menken. This lady had already received the attention of at least seven previous biographers without anyone being left much the wiser about who she really was or even when she was born – sometime around 1835 seems likely. It is certain that she was carried bareback (in more ...”

“... they stand to a possible fact. If Walter de la Mare had known a disquieting and dominating old lady, and written about her, he would not also have been able to write the masterpiece of ‘Seaton’s Aunt’. The process works another way, too. In his splendid stories John Updike creates a far more telling image of himself as a denizen of suburban ...”

“... always seemed to settle me back then. Those with whom I lived considered me vain, excepting the Lady M, with whom I tirelessly played, Parcheesi, Scrabble, less circumscribed games. She would have bought for me a giant gold medallion could she have managed the expense, if only I would let her. Presently the soup was the colour of the room; everything ...”

“... Postwar The ruin on the island keeps away fragmented steps, shoulder bone of upper-storey arch, lady chapel, rank of skinned arms cracked at the wrist. New houses creep near like animals listening to the old – Teach Me Tonight – magnified through a trumpet fixed to the motherboard. My time was blonde scraped up in a froth. Now our white hair is arranged ...”

“... who the author of Pamela was when he wrote Shamela, but did know when he praised Clarissa. When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said ‘I heartily despise [Richardson] and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his works in a most scandalous manner,’ she was responding simultaneously to the power of the novels and to a personality felt through the work to be ...”

“... be missing. ‘Was Varlamov here today?’ a woman’s voice asks – that of a fine, but kind lady. What scenes these are. Splendour and misery. Servitude and its transfiguration. Yegorushka is engaged upon an entry into captivity which is also an escape. Many people like to think that great artists must be great innovators – even Chekhov, who refused ...”

“... description of that moment of biographical contact carries an echo of Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ (‘I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark/Suddenly, his expression in a glass’). In The Merchant of Prato she borrows a more challenging metaphor. The book’s opening words – epigraphic if not actually placed as an epigraph – are by ...”

“... a professor troll, whom he observed through a keyhole eating his own wife. The Troll was eating a lady. Poor girl, she was tightly clutched to its breast by those rudimentary arms, with her head on a level with its mouth. She was dressed in a nightdress which had crumpled up under her armpits, so that she was a pitiful naked offering, like a classical picture ...”

“... why Wilson allowed him to do so. Present in these pages, for example, is the tale of the Beautiful Lady In Red (though, unlike most of the others, not very well told). This concerns a state ball in the capital of Brazil, where our hero, as Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, is the guest of honour. When the orchestra strikes up a ...”

“... the wife of Gilbert de Préville Colvile and of Tom, the fourth Baron Delamere. Gwladys, Lady Delamere (Tom’s stepmother, wife of the third Baron, who broke the news to Broughton that ‘Joss is wildly in love with Diana’). Plus a number of walk-on, climb-on or lie-down roles for assorted ex-Etonian or Brigade of Guards adulterers, big-game ...”

“... Gilroy took temporary jobs, as a filing clerk in a mail-order sweatshop and as a uniformed maid to Lady Anne (no surname given), a determined supporter of the empire. Often sympathetic in her descriptions of others, particularly women and children, Gilroy can also be unsparing. She notes that Hilda, the ruthless manageress of the sweatshop, keeps a special ...”