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“... Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’ has a murder scene as intimate, detailed and unflinchingly choreographed as its counterparts in Crime and Punishment and The Kreutzer Sonata. Katerina Lvovna has killed her father-in-law with rat poison because he promised to expose her affair with a peasant, and now that her husband has returned, she and her lover murder him too ...”

“... treatment of the works in their own right. Three pages each for analysis of The Plumed Serpent and Lady Chatterley’s Lover may be necessarily short shrift when there are more than thirty books to be mentioned. But one would still like a more scrupulous treatment of the autobiographical elements in Lawrence’s fiction, and the irreducibly ambiguous relation ...”

“... because ‘broke’ doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone. She is chatting fondly to the lady in the next seat, apparently a relative or a companion. She is remembering the grand life, a lost, bemused look in her eyes, a quiet enthusiasm in her voice. Those were the days, those will always have been the days. The ...”

“... are not allowed to say so. Furbank seems to be falling here into the same trap, as he calls it, as Lady Longford did in a radio interview which he quotes from. Interviewer: Would it be right to say you come from a comfortable middle-class family? Lady Longford Upper middle class ... That was what we were told. I never ...”

“... and almost equally unpopular after it. Nobody regretted his death except his mercenary mistress, Lady Conyngham – the supply of jewels and trinkets had been cut off – and even she was bored with him. Grief was absent at his funeral. ‘A coronation could hardly be gayer,’ noted a peer, and the Times reported that there was ‘not a single mark of ...”

“... a well-dressed couple arrives at the scene of an accident on a busy street in Vienna. The lady is uncomfortable, ‘had a disagreeable sensation in the pit of her stomach, which she felt entitled to take for compassion’. The man, after a pause, says: ‘These heavy lorries they use here have too long a braking-distance.’ The ...”

“... film director Gustav Machaty found it very difficult to elicit a reaction from his leading lady, the 19-year-old Hedy Kiesler. The film told a Lady Chatterley-ish story of a woman, Eva, who flees an unhappy marriage with a wealthy older man, and falls in love with a young engineer called Adam. Machaty had planned a ...”

“... 1573 and 1637. (Partridge’s publications in other genres, including long verse romances like Lady Pandavola and The Worthie Hystorie of Plasidas, were nothing like as successful.) The book was a goldmine of domestic instruction, functioning (the title-page claims) as ‘The good Huswives Closet of provision, for the health of her Houshold’. The recipes ...”

“... is a form of address rather than a name: an abbreviation of madonna, literally translated as ‘my lady’ but as used in 16th-century Italy something more like ‘Mistress’ or ‘Mrs’.) To Italians the painting is and always has been La Gioconda (and to the French, La Joconde or Gioconde). This may be a reference to the same Lisa del Giocondo, but the ...”

“... it is in 1922, when Eliot is establishing his new literary periodical, the Criterion, sponsored by Lady Rothermere, that his distrust of Mansfield reaches a peak. The first sign of the crisis comes in a letter from Vivien to Pound, in which she says that Lady Rothermere has written ‘three offensive letters’ to Tom about ...”

“... because wordplay must mean a lack of emotion. It didn’t. It didn’t. ‘If he do bleed,’ Lady Macbeth had said of the murdered Duncan – he bled, he most certainly bled, gallons gushed – ‘I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal,/for it must seem their guilt.’ ‘Gild’, ‘guilt’: there were puns at a moment of intense emotion. Alice ...”

“... publishing El nervio óptico in 2014 and La luz negra, now translated as Portrait of an Unknown Lady, in 2018. Her grandfather edited the conservative newspaper La Prensa, which her father inherited, although the family had to sell its extravagant headquarters to the state in 1988. (It’s now the Buenos Aires House of Culture.) This is a complicated ...”

“... as did Byron. Very clever, he got a scholarship to Heidelberg where he acquired his doctorate.’ Lady Mosley burbled on in this vein for a bit, spicing things up with references to Goebbels’s ‘inspired oratory’. Concerning Kristallnacht she was scrupulously non-judgmental, concluding that ‘his guilt must rest on supposition.’ I remember wondering ...”

“... myth which recurs throughout the book locates the original crime much further back: the Black Lady. This woman apparently used her power of foresight to predict plots against the throne so that those whom she accused, even the King’s own relatives, could be executed the next day. The Black Lady makes several ...”

“... later: ‘Don’t set yourself down as a failure till you see how we children turn out.’ To Lady Mary Murray, wife of Gilbert Murray, the Professor of Greek at Oxford, the blinkered undergraduate seemed to have gone too far in claiming that the crisis was worse for him than for his mother, whom he had supported in a deplorably inadequate way. ‘You ...”