“... political affiliation, friend or foe, guilt or innocence. Mrs Coyle, Michael’s Catholic cleaning lady, whose son is holed up in police custody, ‘visibly unfurls’ on hearing Cushla’s Gaelic name; at the other end of the spectrum, Victor, one of Michael’s middle-class friends, sits ‘peering at her through the smoke from the cigar he was toking ...”

“... a world of scurrying maids, laughing guards, courtiers ‘jealously discussing a posting’, a lady scuttling out of an equerry’s chamber.Lucrezia thinks in metaphors of embroidery and painting because they’re what she knows best. Outside the cathedral on the morning of her wedding, she notices the way ‘the campanile has stitched itself to the summer ...”

“... and Roussel (‘Ginger’) de Bailleul. Roussel – the hero of Duggan’s Lady for Ransom – took part in the Byzantine campaign of 1071 against the invading Turks, which ended in disastrous defeat at Manzikert, but got away with his men and used the collapse of Byzantine power to set up an independent kingdom in what is now ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”