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“... of a nonsense joke she had made a couple of months earlier in a gossipy letter to her sister: ‘Lady Sondes is an impudent Woman to come back into her old Neighbourhood again; I suppose she pretends never to have married before – & wonders how her Father & Mother came to have her christen’d Lady Sondes.’ The fact ...”

“... are not fused, imaginatively or stylistically. Victor Grant, the narrator of Confessions of a Lady-Killer, is deserted by his wife after feminist friends raise her consciousness. He decides, reasonably enough, to murder the ringleaders in revenge. The early sections of the novel contain some lively satire against the wilder excesses of contemporary ...”

“... was that of the Virgin Mary. At Jaen in 1430, for example, four people saw the Virgin as a tall lady in white: ‘From this lady issued so much brightness that she shone as the sun shines.’ At Sant Aniol, near Girona, she appeared as ‘a beautiful, elegant woman dressed in white’. At Pinos, near Lleida, in 1507, a ...”

“... when was he anything else? He has made a habit of being 60; he has made a profession of it. Like Lady Dumbleton, he has been 60 for the last 25 years. On his own admission there was never a boy Larkin; no young lad Philip, let alone Phil, ever. Besides, why a book? He must be fed up at the sight of books. It’s books, books, books every day of his life, and ...”

“... make themselves fully as ridiculous as Mrs Trimmer, and are offended even more easily. One good lady, ‘active in several American feminist groups’, has been through children’s dictionaries: ‘two solid days of reading – filled with eyestrain, boredom and outrage’. She finds that John is able to touch his toes, while Ann is not able: John is at ...”

“... few pages, when she loses her point and joins all the rest of us in our all too real banality. The Lady of Shalott took drastic measures in terms of art when the curse of living came upon her. Lolita survives her enchanting nymphetude, and for a while is as interesting as a dull little wife as she was when presenting Humbert Humbert with his destiny. Brookner ...”

“... She was addicted to childish and ill-judged ‘larks’, which ranged from dressing up as an old lady to do research at a psychiatrist’s to attending a Mosley rally in 1936 in the hope of turning the crowd against him. She was also a psychopath behind the wheel of a car, adding to the perils of the Blitz by volunteering to drive an ambulance. To counter ...”

“... no generic difference worth the name between, say, The House of Seven Gables and The Portrait of a Lady, or for that matter between Daphnis and Chloe and Ulysses. James admitted that there was no definite boundary between novel and romance, but he knew that in such extreme cases there was no problem telling one from the other. Of course you can argue that ...”

“... in sex is waning, although substitutes in the form of various massages are available on the NHS. Lady Margaret Hall is the massage centre for Oxford, and in Oxford lives the diarist-narrator Theo Faron, cousin and boyhood friend of the Warden and teacher of history (‘the least rewarding discipline for a dying species’) to the last generation born, the ...”

“... Christian, of sorts. In ‘A Letter from Brooklyn’, from the collection In a Green Night, an old lady writes to the poem’s narrator, ‘in a spidery style,/Each character trembling’, about his dead father and about her confidence in the father’s place in heaven: ‘So this old lady writes,’ the poem ends, echoing ...”

“... the Romantics. It contains multitudes, most famously the late 14th-century tapestry cycle of the Lady and the Unicorn, but it is the site itself, a medieval house built among the ruins of a Roman bath complex, the barely credible survival of two thousand years of use and reuse, that gives it its peculiar resonance. A speeded-up film of Cluny’s history ...”

“... of roughly the right appearance, and to recruit actors to play all the significant roles: an old lady to fry the liver, a balding piano player, a motorbike enthusiast, a concierge. Lives will be lived on repeat while he moves through the building watching and rewatching the same trivial events unfold. While teams of investigators scour likely areas of London ...”

“... flicks past her at the counter and a splash of Sincere coffee fills her cup – Ray is all yours lady! No date no wait no fate to contemplate! he grins. Contour of a person so different from what you can get into bits of speech. His calf muscles for instance were huge. Like a ballet dancer’s. She thought about it walking beside him. Or a bicycle ...”

“... in her son’s back, as Vernon reflects: I’ll tell you a learning: knife-turners like my ole lady actually spend their waking hours connecting shit into a humongous web, just like spiders. It’s true. They take every word in the fucken universe, and index it back to your knife. In the end it doesn’t matter what words you say, you feel it on your ...”

“... then elderly woman-and-novelist, I have grudgingly suffered photographs to be taken of me as lady writer: with cat … in front of a rubber plant … sitting with cup of tea gazing at a typewriter. No one has suggested the lady-writer with knitting shot. It may be that they dared not. The knitting me wasn’t an image ...”