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“... He vowed that he ‘would prefer to sit in a Room with a Chime of Bells, ten Parrots and one Lady Westmorland to sitting in a cabinet with Lord Macaulay’. Melbourne might have been more scathing still about his latest biographer, Leslie Mitchell. Mitchell’s technique is to repeat – and repeat, and repeat again – his own unsympathetic spin on ...”

“... calling on the gods to stand up for bastards, or Lear petitioning and pleading with them, or Lady Macbeth’s ‘Unsex me here,’ or her husband’s final soliloquy (‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’), which borrows from Psalm 90. Inasmuch as Shakespeare’s soliloquies are addressed to the audience, we become God by proxy, the Delphic oracle ...”

“... of her sister, had used her earnings to help smuggle 29 Jews out of Germany. Forgotten now was Lady Josephine Clarke (Errol Fitzgerald) who had retired hurt in 1951 when her 52nd novel, Unwanted Bride, was returned unwanted. Boon retained editorial control. Under the new regime those authors who felt their talents and integrity had been impugned by ...”

“... that made her, and eventually her writing, so attractive. Leslie French remembered her playing a lady-in-waiting in Twelfth Night: ‘you never saw a lady waiting so well or so violently; she had terrific poise, so much poise I feared she would topple over backwards.’ In private life David was less restrained. She never ...”

“... sorry for her – we deeply commiserate her case.’ Ainsworth, he gives us to understand, is a ‘lady-killer’, he is ‘this Turpin of the cabriolet’. He did not expect his readers literally to become highwaymen, or even lady-killers; but he did expect them to identify with Turpin’s courage, audacity and ...”

“... Dream’ for Il Penseroso or Parnell’s ‘A Night-piece on Death’; his mock diatribe ‘To a Lady who put herself into a bad way, by taking Spirit of Nitre, by Spoonfuls, instead of a few Drops’ for Gay or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; and ‘The Motto on Pug’s Collar’, ‘On Sir Isaac Newton’ (‘O’er ...”

“... hope it may be the last time we will have to send you congratulations on such an occasion,’ Lady Grant wrote back to her daughter with some impatience after James, number 13. Why, given their intelligence and scientific pragmatism, the Stracheys did not control their fertility is a point on which Caine is disappointingly silent. Had they done ...”

“... Beatrice Webb and the coterie of Oxford women who had been instrumental in founding Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall must have given suffragists pause.For a time, then, and as Bush implies, the suffrage battle was less a ‘sex war’ than an argument among women – and one that did not divide neatly along progressive v. reactionary lines. Busy running ...”

“... football games – roughs up a young man with strong political connections, threatens an old lady by tearing her oxygen tube out, bullies a football player into throwing a game, and crosses over to the real dark side by selling police information to a top drug dealer. Nothing but trouble is heading his way, and all of it arrives. Somewhere in his ...”

“... he went on to paint writers (Pope, Steele, Prior), aristocrats (the Marquess of Rockingham, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) and doctors (Richard Mead, Sir Hans Sloane). But he turned down an offer to be the King’s Painter because he objected to ‘the slavery of court dependence’. His writings on art were read widely (his Essay on the Theory of ...”

“... but its destruction was, he said, ‘an act of vandalism’ on a scale rare outside wartime. Lady Churchill had form. She had put her foot through a preparatory sketch by Sickert. When the sculptor David McFall, whose bust was the last image of Churchill taken from life, met her, she told him what she had done to the Sutherland, adding ...”

“... the place and she isn’t wearing any gloves. The year is 1884 – could she be any less like a lady? Mycroft decides instantly that Enola needs to go to a finishing school, and she sees this as a good reason to escape to London in search of her mother. On the train she meets another runaway, a young man who happens to be the missing marquess, and the plot ...”

“... which one of you is Mrs Bloyard?’ snaps a moustachioed French police inspector to a shingled lady and a man in a Charvet scarf. Wimples, however, are only worn by males, who must also be untidily clad in tweed jackets and grey flannels. Baxter’s art may not prove able to resist for much longer the critic’s urge to interpret and to categorise. All ...”

“... are told – but what’s the difference? The plot is straightforward police-procedural: grand old lady is battered to death in Belgravia, dogged but unusually imaginative policeman works his way through the half a dozen or so sure-fire suspects, and gets a bit of help on the side from our hero, a ruminative, world-weary ex-spy called Humphrey Leigh. But as a ...”

“... Perhaps he should retreat to Ireland and safety? A priest offers him assistance from the Our Lady of Knock Fund for Reverse Emigration. But he continues his quest. There are a great many ingenious plots here interlaced, and the book in general supports the learned opinion of Angelica, which is that romance avoids the fate of ‘classic’ narrative ...”