“... bread a sailing ship/A bunweed [ragwort] to a burly spear/And of a sedge a sword of war/A comely lady of a clout [cloth]/And be right busy thereabout.’ They played conkers, tennis and ran about with whirligigs, described in 1598 as ‘a piece of card or paper cut like a cross and with a pin put in at the end of a stick which, running against the wind, doth ...”

“... Society, with the idea that K should be groomed as the future Messiah. Mary’s mother, Lady Emily Lutyens, herself a disruptively keen Theosophist, took such an interest in the boys’ progress – academic, social and religious – that her children saw them every day. Mary was only three years old and can remember nothing before them, but she has ...”

“... notice, the keeper of the woman claimed by A.L. Rowse (after Fraser’s book came out) as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. The ballads collected by Walter Scott contain wonderful praise – together with much that is more wonderful – of reiver exploits, of their boldness. But Fraser is sharp with Scott’s worshipful view of his ancestors. Scott and his ...”

“... else, who infuriated the second Mrs Barker by getting a knighthood, thus making her rival a real lady. Holroyd’s attention to the patterns of Shaw’s sexual behaviour and its putative early causes may be inordinate. He likes to find reflections of them everywhere, and he naturally makes much of the story of Stella, the illness during which Shaw wooed ...”

“... are types and humours – figures like the genial Mine Host, the Old Salt, the Apple-Cheeked Old Lady At The Village Shop, the Country Squire, and a complete fairy story set of Princes, Queens, Princesses, Duchesses and Dukes. Larkin’s ‘sunny Prestatyn’ says as much about tourist-posters as the theme will bear: there is no further point in being glum ...”

“... a world which in My Son’s Story is kept at arm’s length. At the same time, the white lady who becomes involved in black politics through her concern for her domestic, and who finds herself giving sanctuary to an armed fugitive, is almost a stock character in South African fiction. The truly unconventional relationship in this novel is that ...”

“... out of control. A colossal engine of persuasion was put at her disposal and from it emerged the lady of the miracle. At the best of times the extravagant praise of her achievement and greatness was ridiculous; at the present it passes belief. Even those actors in the drama who were wiping her blood from their knives, however, felt required to compete with ...”

“... towards Jaques. To his complacent observation, ‘Yes, I have gained my experience,’ the young lady retorted: ‘And your experience makes you sad. I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.’ In the past, and perhaps in the present too, for most men ‘experience’ will have meant what they learned in the course of their ...”

“... from a Waugh novel: ‘Sligger’ Urquhart and Harold Freese-Penefather ‘with his companion a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Norway’. There is an odd ambiguity dividing Hailsham’s pride in academic achievement and in things done for himself by himself and the glow of famous people’s attention and the gentle thwack of name against floor. The wearing ...”

“... of Stalin’s spies); he disappears to the East. Asya escapes to England. At the end, a very old lady, she unravels the last threads of stories which time and the dislocations of war have left tangled and obscure. Upon this plot are hung scenes familiar from the movies, as well as from other novels: the betrayals, assassinations and sad anxieties of émigré ...”

“... as providing essential safeguards, for themselves and for others. The conviction, for example, of Lady Bird wood for disseminating anti-semitic propaganda would not have been possible without it. Though institutional in its focus, the book also has very little to say about the most important non-synagogal institutions of Anglo-Jewry: its ...”

“... month when the Tory whips were able to bus in several tame backwoods peers in order to vote down Lady Thatcher and her Euro-sceptical allies over a referendum on Maastricht. So why has this preposterous and indefensible place survived the advent of universal suffrage, a succession of nominally socialist governments, and even Citizen Major’s classless ...”

“... the mid-Seventies and staggered into the clear blue water of the Thatcher decade. Until the Iron Lady appeared on the scene. Hanson and White had been equivocal about politics. Tories they both were of course, but pragmatic Tories, careful not to offend the Labour Governments of the Sixties and Seventies. Hanson nurtured his relationship with his fellow ...”

“... their joint Mum – a sprightly old dear, by the sound of it: ‘She could do the splits as an old lady, even when she was so frail and breathless that she couldn’t get up again unaided.’ (Senile agility seems to have run in the family. Of Grandfather Major, we learn here that ‘when he was an elderly man he once went missing. He was subsequently found up ...”

“... stopped for coffee at an estaminet which, unknown to him but not to passing Staff, a notorious lady from Paris had ‘staffed with some winsome daughters of Rahab’? This incident is one of a hundred-odd entries listed under ‘Anecdotes’ in the index, which is clearly Dunn’s own loving work. He was a man with an eye for landscape, weather and ...”