“... be out of it.’ For this is the sixth floor.   Then I thought of Max’s story of the old lady who went to church with her ear trumpet. And so the stern Scotch sexton or verger or something, eyed her a bit. Then he said ‘Madam one toot and you’re oot.’ Perhaps that’s what it would be like, One toot and you’re oot. So she is half-like her ...”

“... Blanche was made less exotic and compared, not to a lizard, but to a more conventional peacock. Lady Marchmain first read aloud from The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which was exchanged for The Wisdom of Father Brown at the same time that the quotation from the latter about ‘a twitch on the thread’ was inserted. These are scraps. There are more ...”

“... has to fight for the phallic reality ... So I wrote my novel, which I want to call John Thomas and Lady Jane ... It rather looks as if Witter Bynner was a good influence on Lawrence, as well as being a severe and witty critic. But then, to judge by these letters, he was a pretty good fellow all round. He seems to have fancied himself as a sort of bohemian ...”

“... Opus 7, a satirical narrative in the style of Crabbe, based on the story of a ‘drinking old lady ... a neighbour for many years, and I had the greatest esteem for her because she knew what she wanted,’ came out in 1931. The late poems were privately printed, except for Boxwood, which STW thought of simply as verses for Reynolds Stone’s wood ...”

“... these events on the life of the house is the subject of the tale. The top flat belongs to an old lady, long retired from her job and on her last lap. She is not a sibyl or a sage, but she is the presiding intelligence, the Mrs Moore of the story. The middle flat is inhabited by a family – father in advertising, mother in a social work job and in love with ...”

“... in their lives that makes ours ugly. In one of the stories in Pig Earth, a little old peasant lady goes out and gathers wild things in the mountains – wild cherries, lilies of the valley, mushrooms, mistletoe – and takes her booty into the city, where she sells it in the market for vast sums. She is selling not only delicious wild produce but glimpses ...”

“... moderated since the Sixties and Seventies, when characters with names like Samantha Light-body and Lady Driver frequented his work. But George Orwell for one would not have held this against him, and the truth is that Frayn is among the funniest novelists alive today. ‘Life, I have come to see, is nothing more nor less than another way of writing ...”

“... courts and rooms: only beneath the awe-inspiring gateway of Thornton Abbey does a sheepish lady in a red hat smile at the photographer. This landscape is unreal even for today. Where are the motorcars, the lawn-mowers, the ice-cream vans, the Saturday afternoon bikers, the bored children, the ignorant tourists, and our inattentive selves? Urban Britain ...”

“... is a good paper, David Astor ‘has flair. It’s not all done by luck’; ancient scandal – a lady-in-waiting of Queen Victoria thought to have been pregnant and a virgin; and best of all, Church politics: ‘Do you go to church?’ he asked. ‘Oh, Church of England. I see the Church of England is making overtures to the Church of Scotland. The Church ...”

“... literature encouraged translated into an iconography of ‘types’: the upper-class dandy and the lady of leisure, their fashion-plate surfaces a foil for the rags of the pitiable poor of the ‘abyss’, as neighbourhoods like the East End of London and New York’s Lower East Side were termed. Ethnicity, occupation and differentiated vices provided ...”

“... whom I adored – ‘wasn’t very nice to her daughter.’ Not long afterwards, an old lady who has known my mother all her life confirmed what my son had intuited: that my grandmother, a young widow, had not paid enough attention to her only daughter, and my mother, for much of her childhood, had had to endure the jealousy of her ...”

“... Irving and Judith have invited me to supper again tonight. I walk round there at seven. An old lady is already in their sitting-room, looking very composed. She is called Helen Rosen – she knew Lillian Hellman and Dashiel Hammett and stood out against McCarthy. She is the widow of a doctor who made a break-through with an operation for the deaf. She ...”

“... futures, her adviser was the counsel to Tyson Foods. Mike Espy, caught accepting favours for his lady friend, exemplifies the intermixture of sex, money and faeces in Washington Babylon’s excremental vision. While those emphasising party difference contrast Democratic support for women’s liberation with Republican defence of traditional family ...”

“... Countess of Bess-borough, was the sister of the Duchess of Devonshire and the mother of Lady Caroline Lamb, Byron’s mistress and wife of William Lamb, later Lord Melbourne, Victoria’s Prime Minister’). We are not told where a letter is sent from, or where it is received. In addition, the index lists only the writers and recipients. The lay-out ...”

“... and preparing, as in The Sportswriter, for a holiday weekend away. Not, this time, with a ‘lady friend’ but with Paul, his troubled teenage son. Since Ford locates the novel so precisely, on a Fourth of July weekend in 1988 with elections looming, you think initially that Frank, like John Updike’s Rabbit, will serve as some kind of litmus test for ...”