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“... but explicit and cynical, and went on about how he would have been ashamed to leave a young lady in the virgin state he found her; and instead of the magic of those ages long ago in which his lovers fled away into the storm, he announced that in the concluding lines of the poem he wished to ‘leave on the reader a sense of pettish ...”

“... his ‘saving grace of coarseness’ by introducing female characters who bend or break the rules (Lady Mason in Orley Farm, Lady Glencora in the Palliser sequence, Lizzie Eustace in The Eustace Diamonds, Mrs Hurtle in The Way We Live Now), and male ones who enjoy gambling or field sports and whose talk is ribald, even lewd ...”

“... background and way of life as it is possible to be. The first of the authors is a solemn, Jewish lady-lawyer; the second an irascible Red Army general; the third (until his death recently in a car crash) was a contumacious bohemian of vagrant habits and wide-ranging intellectual interests. One of the many things that make their books so depressing to ...”

“... War. And of course there are girls everywhere. Last time I dined in Magdalen I sat next to a young lady who presented herself to me as a Fellow of the College. I said to her: ‘I hope you realise that it is thanks to me you are here. It was I who proposed the emancipating amendment to the College Statutes in 1976.’ She was most surprised and said: ‘Do you ...”

“... propagated by ignorant publicists, that the King was prevented by his government from marrying the lady because she was an American. The Government, the Church of England and most public opinion objected to the match because at the time Mrs Simpson had two lawful husbands living. The King did not want to see this unwelcome fact, so, true to form, he did not ...”

“... story of his work at New Delhi is in part one of frustration. He could treat the Viceroy and his lady, and even the King, as distinguished private clients, but the job was not his alone and the decisions were in some degree collective ones. Sir Herbert Baker, who was responsible for the Secretariat buildings, and always had a book of poetry rather than a ...”

“... on literary and social themes, The Sign of the Fish. Many of his portraits are of the beau monde: Lady Cunard and Nancy, Lord Berners, the Duff Coopers, Mrs Fleming and her successive husbands Lord Rothermere and Ian Fleming (who ‘good-naturedly accepted me, no doubt because I was neither a wild bohemian nor a rampant homosexual’). Much of this is ground ...”

“... a strange experience in the woods. Half-English Léonie enjoys the first sighting of a heavenly lady (a pretty swarthy lady, in this instance), but it isn’t long before Léonie’s apparition is appropriated by Thérèse and kitted out with orthodox, Lourdes-type accoutrements. (It isn’t Bernadette, though, who’s ...”

“... the timing of its publication – between the scandals of Ulysses in 1922 and the appearance of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Well of Loneliness in 1928 – meant that My First Thirty Years inevitably attracted the attention of censors in Britain and America. In November 1925 Janet Flanner’s Paris dispatch for the New Yorker discussed the brouhaha ...”

“... used to make a social point. In Bodley 764, a carefully rendered goshawk sits on the arm of a lady, possibly the manuscript’s patroness, Cecily d’Aubigny, while in the background a peasant scares birds into flight. The text tells us that ‘hawks are usually carried on the left hand [which] represents temporal things, the right everything that is ...”

“... Ever since she said it, there has been a run of near misses or all-buts, beginning with Another Lady’s completion of Jane Austen’s fragment ‘Sanditon’, and continuing with someone else’s notion of ‘The Watsons’. Then, in the autumn of 1977, there was an Austen discovery, not of a novel but not of a fragment either – a complete new ...”

“... would have had commercial value: women’s verse was ‘much the fashion of late’, according to Lady Masham in 1685. A smart bookseller friend, Benjamin Crayle, published Barker’s poems in a volume that also included some of his own. This arrangement was not unusual: the male admirer and female poet form an ideal literary couple exchanging enthusiasms and ...”

“... for food. A bowl of cold chicken curry later, I half-led, half-pushed it back home to the gaga lady upstairs – the Flower Girl, the Millionairess, former star of the silent screen – who lived on chocolate and cigarettes. Sshhh, she whispered, one finger on her lips, the same sound of the sea I could hear beyond Flamborough Head. Blossom I'm in ...”

“... among others: Lest at least two kinds of Christians during their annual shoot-out Bisect an old lady who hears the word ‘Duck!’ But can’t hit the deck because of sciatica (May her stoop be steep) – Lest the Druze and the Jews or the Juze and the Drews, When shelling each other from somewhere each side Of a ridge or a bridge, Cascade hot shrapnel on ...”

“... impressive, Wide and high, with its tiled floor and untreated oak very moving’? Ruby, in her tea-lady blue pinafore, stamped half-heartedly on the tiles And showed no sign of softening at the sight of untreated oak. We filed out of the porch into the sun. The air was heavy in the churchyard, smelling of yew. Across the road was a roll of low hills, picture ...”