Sublime

British Library:

It was a risk to mention the Royal Shakespeare Company, and RADA, but the Discreet Mourners woman failed to link Astrid Miller, Audrey Hepburn’s Friend One, with the Astrid Fellowes who had been at the centre of a scandal in the 1970s and had gone mad on stage at the National, midway through a matinee of Macbeth.

Sir James felt with some sadness that she was to have perfect liberty of misjudgment.

asphodels

Such things had been known as forged wills and disputed wills, which seemed to have the golden-hazy advantage of somehow enabling non-legatees to live out of them.

venerated

she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it.

the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman’s world, where everything was done for her and none asked for her aid