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“... first evidence of that MI5 subversion of the Wilson Government dealt with by famous Peter Wright. Lady Falkender and Wilson had urged Goldsmith to sue – Marnham had unwittingly libelled him by saying he was at John Aspinall’s lunch to decide what to do if Lucky turned up. And so on. Goldsmith is discredited, loses a peerage, fails to buy a ...”

“... can console us, when we think it over.’ Even in his favourite ice-cream sundae, a ‘white lady’, the hero has found an emblem of disintegration. I watched the white lady melting. Watched the vanilla melt imperceptibly under the topping of hot chocolate. Watched the scoop of ice-cream, almost perfectly round a ...”

“... would point also to the celebratory history by Beveridge’s fellow intriguer, Jessy Mair, later Lady Beveridge. What this ex-director has pulled off, however, cannot be dismissed as dutiful commemoration, still less as score-settling. Dahrendorf’s LSE is a striking achievement, combining standards of detached scholarship with subjective insight in a way ...”

“... are obscenity, blasphemy and drugs.’ Holbrook still sees that era – which began with the 1960 Lady Chatterley acquittal and ended with the Gay News prosecution in 1976 – as England’s dark age. ‘Permissive’ and ‘alternative’ remain the dirtiest words in his lexicon; his black beast is dressed in soiled denim, ornamented with hand-crafted ...”

“... gave us a lecture which might have been called – and perhaps was – ‘How many children has Lady Macbeth now?’ But he took enough intellectual lore for granted to get pretty quickly to Hamlet or Coriolanus. If Bateson or Knights had been lecturing to the Conference at Reading, I don’t think they would have reached a poem or a play: political ...”

“... and burgers he has hogged. Is there a connection between Frank the Phone and the tall, red-haired lady in a veil who seems to be following him round town? If there is, Self can’t ever quite muster the mental energy to work it out. Nor does he have the wits to figure out the role of Doris Arthur, the feminist scriptwriter hired by Fielding to work on Good ...”

“... Sense and Nonsense is a 17th-century allegory by Laurent de la Hire. It shows Grammar as a lady seriously engaged in watering some rather spindly potted plants. In her left hand she holds what looks like a very long tape-measure, bearing the words vox litterata et articulata debito modo pronuntiata. Presumably this tape-measure is for checking inch by ...”

“... being a housewife’, but he is soon making preparations to move on. The last words his forsaken lady says to him are those an aspiring hero most dreads. ‘You know?’ she asks him. ‘Something I didn’t kind of see you as? You’re a coward.’ There is a political point, as well as an emotional one, in Raban’s use of a defective quest as the literary ...”

“... Brougham had been a terror and a torment in his time. To Lord Sefton he was ‘the Archfiend’; Lady Grey, in a shrewder assessment, identified him with Dryden’s Achitophel. No one, it is true, had ever been able to deny his extraordinary abilities, or the almost frenetic energy with which he applied them to the innumerable objects he had in contemplation ...”

“... realist, operating within the “world” presented in the work’. It is not ashamed to ask about Lady Macbeth’s children, or to speculate on the behaviour and motivation of characters in terms similar to those we employ when trying to comprehend the actions of our associates and friends. Although Nuttall admits that certain of the ideas put forward by ...”

“... up to now this remarkable politician’s appearances on television have been like those of Our Lady of Lourdes in the Pyrenees. We know that both he and She show themselves from time to time, and that they are potentially able to work miracles. But no one can actually think of a major, sustained speech, illuminating the most urgent problems of our ...”

“... important – who chose food, clothes and furnishings ‘not without care but without taste’. Lady Strachey’s principled charmlessness seems to have extended to her way with words: Dorothy Strachey remembers a romance-shrivelling reading of Tom Jones and a lot of good talk which left the children edgy and bored. In recalling the infrequent interventions ...”

“... But it is nothing of the kind. Most of the facts will be familiar to anyone conversant with Lady Donaldson’s study, and most of the gossip is merely being dished up again for the umpteenth time. The author seems unable to decide whether his story is a latterday version of Cinderella, Pygmalion, Gone with the Wind, Hamlet or Othelio. His understanding ...”

“... illuminate all men and all women. Poirier’s early study of Henry James through The Portrait of a Lady already urges us to think of Isabel Archer ‘as an Emersonian Becky Sharp’ who chooses to marry a parody of Emerson’s transcendentalist, and only then sees her error. The seed of all Poirier is in one prophetic paragraph that exalts American literary ...”

“... did it repeatedly. They were showing off for the journalists, and clearly trying to wind up the lady officer. A man from the Mail on Sunday walked round and round the Close, chapping on all the doors, getting himself steamed up. Every time he heard something interesting – and often when he heard something not – he’d draw out his mobile phone and call ...”