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“... of his relatives might have known some of mine came last year from a cousin of Leonid’s, an old lady called Revekka who remembers meeting one of my great-uncles in Moscow in the late Twenties. My great-uncle was by then an American and very rich. Revekka’s mother, who was very poor, hoped that if the rich American saw her young daughter, he would give her ...”

“... until 1942, two years after the death of Chamberlain, and he was never a Conservative Whip. Lady Byron did not have a brother who died in 1815. After fifteen years of marriage, Sir Ralph and Lady Milbanke, having enjoyed, according to the latter’s aunt, better health, unexpectedly had a daughter Annabella, who was ...”

“... these lines. Lawrence himself, oddly enough, would not qualify; certainly not in the context of Lady Chatterley. One of the many not quite right things about that novel is the way Lawrence tries to distance sexual excitement from himself and his readers, making it a matter of the higher impulse: the feel in the blood and not the sex in the head. Being, in ...”

“... idea that I will do Defence Procurement under that man is OUT,’ he wrote. ‘And I will give the lady my reasons. I’d really rather be back on the estate.’ An upper-class Englishman was giving his view of having to work in a junior capacity for a career politician whom any decent castle-owner could spot at once was a ‘wanker’. As always, he was true ...”

“... the knighthood, the Order of Merit, the honorary degrees faithfully chronicled on the title-pages (Lady Frazer would surely have pounced on any omission). It all seems like a copious burial hoard among which – somewhere – Frazer himself unobtrusively lies. Mr Ackerman has set himself the task of excavation. The site is relatively untouched; the only ...”

“... of the fictional structure, this woman becomes, in the book, Lena von Pussel, a German lady intimate with Elgar in distant days when they were both aspiring musicians, but now, at the time of the narrative, resident in Brazil. We are encouraged to believe that she is the hidden subject of the 13th Enigma Variation, and that consequently the letters ...”

“... again not just on his own testimony) to have evolved quite a relationship with the First Lady. It had, indeed, been Hillary’s idea to get Morris back on the team after Clinton’s reverse in Arkansas in 1979. She it was who snatched up the phone and made that cheap pager vibrate its thrilling summons. ‘Bill needs you right now,’ she breathed. I ...”

“... Even old loyalties turned a bit sceptical. In her Memories of George Meredith one of his fans, Lady Butcher, recalled how he had thrilled her with his first inspiration for One of Our Conquerors, as they walked together on Box Hill. As I listened to his wonderful voice telling of the tragic history of Nathalie and the dawning wonder of Nesta, I thought it ...”

“... words in Greek script; he was, with this degree of concealment, named Dung or Filth or Poofy. Lady Penelope commented affectionately on her lover’s green teeth and his smell. He irritated her parents by ostentatiously wearing a made-up white tie, which he snapped back and forth on its elastic. After many vicissitudes there was a secret marriage, and ...”

“... with judicious exposition; and it assembles its material under a number of pungent headings – ‘Lady Novelists and Honorary Men’, ‘The Sex War’, and so on. This author is knowledgable and persuasive on the topic of the outlet literature affords certain perennial aversions: we have Ivy Compton Burnett, for example, ‘with her attacks upon male ...”

“... but also Irish and proud of it. Yet Yeats declined to think of himself as an Irish painter. Lady Gregory wanted him for her renaissance (to a considerable extent an Anglo-Irish affair). His not altogether helpful champion, Thomas MacGreevy, loudly claimed him for Ireland, but Samuel Beckett, deploring this as he deplored attempts to exaggerate his own ...”

“... to do that, but finally agrees to place the child in Paley’s lap. A white man says to her: ‘Lady, I wouldn’t of touched that thing with a meat hook.’ Paley loves America, and was brought up to celebrate its difference from dark old pogrom-stained Europe. But it is full of terrible remembrances for her, and that is precisely what she calls this ...”

“... they will get lucky – that tonight, unlike all the other nights, they will chance upon a true ‘lady of pleasure’: a healthy whore who likes it, and who quite likes them. The fantasy of purchasable and yet genuine (just for you) sexual compliance has brutally deep roots. As to the others who ‘go back for more’ – well, in many cases, Carol and Sharon ...”

“... to be the best piece in The Pangs of Love, a story called ‘The Easter Lilies’, a dotty old lady resents buying Easter flowers when the things grow wild in Malta. Sacrificing custom regulations to common sense, she has a bunch sent over. The rich ungrateful bitch acting as courier drops her pearls in the bouquet. The old ...”

“... Polish literary history falls in and has to be rewritten. Hence too, more famously, his essay on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, proving with precise, lawyerly argument what some had already half-suspected: that the seventh erotic encounter between Mellors and Lady Chatterley, where the gamekeeper ‘burns out the shame in ...”