“... 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 ...”

“... on children’s clothes and shoes, they would never, never, never get it through the House.’ The lady doth protest too much. Three nevers in a row! On food, she said: ‘Let me say to people I have undertaken not to do it on food ...’ But of course she had already done so: that principle was breached when she introduced VAT on takeaways. One remembers the ...”

“... Act when she rode cackling through the streets of Cape Town, naked on a donkey in homage to Lady Godiva, holding a placard which read: ‘Ban the Immorality Act.’ It was a horrible, wonderful sight, and a day of great joy and celebration. When I arrived at Drum in 1967 there were still some major figures in place. There was Stanley Motjuwadi, a writer ...”

“... age of 20, when he returned to Oxford after the war, as an undergraduate, he was accompanied by a lady of 45 from whom he was not to be parted until her death more than thirty years later.This liaison has been variously interpreted, but there is no doubt – and Wilson has none – that what began as the finding of a substitute mother was soon complicated by ...”

“... already habituated him to short commons and fair shares – ‘they were very ration-minded,’ a lady-in-waiting recalled without enthusiasm – and found not too much difficulty in permanently cutting down on royal flummery to fit the style of a more egalitarian age. He remained a stickler for constitutional forms and the proper degree of outward show that ...”

“... Lambeth, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury, applying this principle to the problems of Palestine. Lady Fisher, supported by her husband, had seemed to condone an act of Arab terrorism (the bombing of a bus containing children) by talking about ‘brave men... acting for their own country’. Woolf won’t have such acts justified, whether those who commit ...”

“... As if irritated by my confusion – the situation is so clear to him – he shrugs. ‘Look, lady, these things happen.’ I stare at this agent of fate incredulously. She wants to know where I keep my jewellery. ‘I don’t have any,’ I say, thinking of the watch, gold bracelet and earrings that I am wearing, that I wore that other day, too, and ...”

“... the lovers are basketball-players, biologists and agronomists, the tone is that of Chekhov’s ‘Lady with a Little Dog’. In Uvarova’s ‘Love’ the headmaster and the school inspector never mention his wife or her husband, ‘as if they didn’t exist’. There are moving stories, too, of endurance, and women’s long tradition (or bad habit) of ...”

“... knocking the breath out of him’); but also, rather oddly, a collector of grotesques (the lesbian lady who insists on treating her mannish companion as a piece of fluff, the comedian’s wife who commits a malapropism in every speech). The grotesques, here as in Ackroyd’s other novels, are often very funny, and I accept his implication that apparently ...”

“... Father, or an example?’), the fascination with low life and moral ambiguity (‘Oh dead punk lady with the knack/Of looking fierce in pins and black,/The suburbs wouldn’t want you back’), and the frank versions of a gay overworld (‘Yet when I’ve had you once or twice/I may not want you any more’) would have made him a guru here; I presumed that ...”