“... 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 ...”

“... over in the living-room. ‘Di’ herself was in the picture just the other night. Quite the lady once you get to know her... I also like what Reed says about the fickleness of crowds. It was so sweet to see the masses gather under the balcony of Buckingham Palace this summer, yelling for the ‘Queen Mum’. She hasn’t been in such direct personal ...”

“... wear a nightie, ducked her in the surf, threw away her wedding ring and worshipped her as ‘Our Lady of the Sands’. Linda herself claims to be descended from Joan of Arc, so – pace Bryan – you don’t really care when she sees UN number plates on Richard and Dan’s car, or CIA notepaper in their beach house. Nor do you think that Dan’s sojourn in a ...”

“... Russian roulette with mortar bombs. Neither man would lose face by moving first. Stuff the little lady and the stout civilian type, the boys had important business to attend to: their vanity. I’m sure that E. was jealous of Modesto’s reputation for bravery, of his commanding an army, not merely reporting this war. But why did Modesto let himself get ...”

“... occupation, itself over twenty years old. We drive to a freezing office in the city where a large lady in her forties is seated at a desk beside a one-bar fire. Her card reads ‘Artificial Limbs Manufacture, Cinema Street’. ‘What do you think of our intifada?’ she asks with evident pride. ‘You saw Bethlehem at Christmas? How was it?’ ‘Empty,’ I ...”

“... with them was enjoyable, if confusing sometimes. I thought of getting together with a little old lady in Worthing to write some sharp little stories she had in mind but it never came off. I did write a poem, called ‘Two Fingers’, with Judy Delaghty, about a young woman losing her virginity in a drunken and brutal way at a party, but there’s not much of ...”

“... The best of them is ‘The Girl from Zlot,’ a modern narrative that retains the metres of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ – ‘Four grey walls, and four grey towers’ – and catches some of Tennyson’s ...”