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“... I am. (Pause) MR MORTIMER: Alone today? MISS PLUNKETT: I beg your pardon? MR MORTIMER: No ‘boss lady’? MISS PLUNKETT: Lying down. We had a walk on to the clock tower. She overdid it. She often overdoes it. Are you two acquainted? MR MORTIMER: One nods. We smile. A fellow guest. She is a handsome woman. MISS PLUNKETT: Yes. ‘Very good for her age’ is a ...”

“... Birds sang in their own Sweet language, and the world was joyful. And the son of the widowed lady Living alone in the Barren Forest rose, and quickly Saddled his hunting horse . . . In these lines we are introduced to the hero of Chrétien de Troyes’s last romance, written late in the 12th century. He is a youth brought up in the forest, without any ...”

“... body. Rowse had come upon Forman in the investigation of his candidate for Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, a promising one if such a person is required: the Court musician Emilia Bassano, Emilia Lanier once married, who consulted him as to whether her husband would get a knighthood and she become a real lady. She did ...”

“... pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the doubtful honour of being the Dark Lady are discussed (so far as the list went in 1970) and a slight preference is registered for Mary Fitton, who had a good run for many years but, when investigated, turned out to have a fair complexion, her hair merely brown. But there is no definite ...”

“... still wearing the long duster coats she had worn in 1920 and Queen Mary looked like an Edwardian lady all her life: dying in the Fifties, she still dressed as she had in 1910. Look at Ford Madox Brown’s Work: only the middle and upper classes are dressed in a contemporary way; the workmen, the flower-seller and the poorer characters are dressed in what ...”

“... Fixed in the mind, they burn For things to be in peace. Invocation Unanswering voice, Sustainer, Lady or Lord: I have no choice But to attend Your silent word. I think again Of the first poet Of our tongue: Abandoning The sweet, profane Intoxication Of plucked string And exploit sung. At your command He sang creation. He had withdrawn To where His silence ...”

“... her nectary. * The dead jack-rabbit has dried flat as wood, like a Texas cricket bat. * I find Our Lady of Guadalupe out there, watching through the wire. * Only the eagle moves in this heat, shimmering in the blue thermals. * Covering my tracks I have tied mesquite branches to the horse’s tail. * These are just fences and the fences are burning. This is ...”

“... can’t be so far away.’ Bring me that fellow called Hay. Uncork a bottle of smoke. Help the old lady out of the bush. Hee haw, when the cart has passed and straws still glint on some snags in the hedge. Close your eyes and make a mum with your mouth shut. Just so. Now look. The stanza is a born dancer, out on the green. Tongs and bones in your good ear. The ...”

“... She had no real part in his plot and outside it is irritatingly redundant. Meanwhile the leading lady of the film falls ‘commercially but genuinely in love with Tom’. The film having been successfully finished, he thinks up another, set in Roman Britain, with the same leading lady and even a small part for the tiresome ...”

“... her sons Sikander (the Indian for Alexander) and Chotta; they both become soldiers. The other lady calls hers Sanjay, and he becomes a poet – and the monkey with the typewriter in his next incarnation. This crude synopsis of a tiny part of the story gives an idea of its complication and improbability, but none of its fascination, charm, and sheer ...”

“... it to England. The mummy’s gilded mask was donated to the British Museum; the coffin went to Lady Susan Meux for her private museum of Egyptian artefacts at Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire. She died in 1911, leaving her collection to the British Museum, but they didn’t want it: it was a condition of her bequest that it be kept together rather than ...”

“... Cary, the other in a scribal hand. The second has been meticulously corrected from the first by Lady Rochester, who does not however correct the ascription of three stanzas of the poem to ‘Dux Bucks’ and three more to ‘Fleetwood Shepherd’. Harold Love did not know of these important manuscripts, and seems not to have recognised ...”

“... 1954, was about a careless dry cleaner, and began the dispatches from ‘a rather long-winded lady’ whom the New Yorker heard from ‘occasionally’. Introducing 47 of these pieces for a collection published in 1969, Brennan gave a sketch of her alter ego. She ‘thinks the best view of the city is the one you get from the bar that is on top of the ...”

“... Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh on the subject:I used to masturbate whenever I thought about Lady Jane Grey so of course I thought about her constantly and even executed a fine watercolour of her on the scaffold, which my mother still has, framed, and in which Lady Jane and her ladies-in-waiting all wear watches ...”

“... Plumb’s Walpole (a grand opera, complete with overture, but still lacking its third act); Lady Longford’s Wellington (her pen as mighty as his sword); Gash’s Peel (a peerless study of a baronet); Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (one patrician beguilingly evoking another); Blake’s Disraeli (champagne and epigrams all the way); and Marquand’s ...”