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“... it diplomatic not to do so. Therefore I used pseudonyms. Now I can say that a character I called Lady Kathleen V – was Edith Sitwell. She and I became friends eventually, but for a while I was in hot water. It began with my discovery of the diary of Jimmy Mason, known as the Hermit of Great Canfield, in the loft of my parents’ house. I was 16 at the ...”

“... if also notably inept even in a prosecution that was conducted with remarkable ineffectiveness. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he proposed, was not a book that any upright citizen would wish his maidservant to read. Almost certainly there was not one member of the jury whose morning tea was brought in by ‘a maidservant’ and probably not one person in ...”

“... individuality and independence of mind. Out of that we get the poems of Yeats and the journals of Lady Gregory. Out of that, too, we get Sir William Wilde and his wife. ‘Of late years,’ Yeats wrote in The Trembling of the Veil (1922), ‘I have often explained Wilde to myself by his family history.’ Yeats recounted an old Dublin riddle: Question: ‘Why ...”

“... Kitchen Calendar The seventh month of the year, And the kitchen calendar Turns over to her, The Lady of Shalott. One candle in the boat Snuffed out by storm, one still bright Stand over the horizontal Crucifix, the only jewel She plucked from the castle wall And threw on to its back. The rope in her hand is slack. The river has its way to make. No more than ...”

“... the summer of 1917, he decided to propose to a young Englishwoman, Georgie Hyde-Lees. He wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I certainly feel very tired & have a great longing for order, for routine & shall be content if I find a friendly serviceable woman. I merely know – we had our talk alone two years ago – that I think this girl both friendly, serviceable ...”

“... the word “hunger” like I do. Or the word “love”,’ Billie Holiday says in her memoir Lady Sings the Blues (written in 1956 with William Dufty and now reissued). Like Kafka’s hunger artist, Holiday let song make a spectacle of her deprivation. ‘I don’t need a friend/My heart is broken, it won’t ever mend/I ain’t much carin’/Just where ...”

“... for fluke and blues in that wind How you gonna build memories Everything shut down or gone Let the lady have a try Sponge Bob, Spookerama, Luna Park Shoot ’im in the head the Mighty Atom, Thunderbolt, Wonder Wheel He likes it when you shoot ’im in the face Surf House, Astroland, Shutzkin’s knishes, A real live human target ‘Hungry for Fun’, fried ...”

“... Nor is psychological transparency her strong suit. Indeed, she might once have served as poster-lady for that delicate mental process Freud called the Censorship. Given all that seems to go on unacknowledged in her emotional world, these undated, untethered notes can often read – shockingly – like eerie and unprecedented eruptions from the maternal ...”

“... of Modern Art had allowed a modern painter to exhibit in the main hall a representation of Our Lady of Guadalupe with the face of Marilyn Monroe in place of that of Our Lady. This blasphemy had outraged the leaders of Catholic opinion. The unwritten understanding in Mexico is that while the Church is not constitutionally ...”

“... In The Winter’s Tale it is Bohemia. In Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, Adam’s Rib and The Lady Eve, it is Connecticut. In The Lady Eve, indeed, it is called ‘Conneckticut’ and, as Cavell observes, ‘it is all but explicitly cited as a mythical location, since nobody is quite sure how you get there, or anyway ...”

“... Sellers will shift more copies. This is partly because Sellers is dead, and when the little-old-lady market pulls out its hankies, money falls to the floor, and the little old ladies gladly cough up the wherewithal for a memento mori to carry home and stick under a short harmonium leg. Many of them, of course, will read it, which may also explain why the ...”

“... and 27 orphans. Such robustness was possessed by Mademoiselle Henriette d’Angeville, the first lady (repeat, lady) to climb Mont Blanc. She claims to have weighed the human odds beforehand, but it is hard to picture her with her six guides, on that bright September morning in 1838, ticking off the potential casualties on ...”

“... rather than as a subject. Like many social stoics, Duff Cooper was born half and half. His mother Lady Agnes Duff, from a Scottish family, eloped twice – first with the dashing young Viscount Dupplin, heir to the Earldom of Kinnoul. It seemed a suitable match, and her parents came to accept it. They had a daughter, who later on as ‘Marie Hay’ became a ...”

“... the quest for papers at Belvoir Castle (Lord John Manners and George Smythe), Weston Park (Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield) and Windsor Castle, where there apparently still exists a notable private correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward VII. Perhaps ...”

“... a short, weary-looking man in his sixties tramping up and down the Mall, looking out for a plump lady of about 45 who was keeping an eye open for him. Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh had travelled to town for the winter from her country seat in Lancashire; the man she was trying to spot in the crowd was Samuel Richardson, who had ...”