“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”