“... treated more carefully by George. Myrtle is sent to a posh boarding school to be ‘made into a lady’. Pompey Jones becomes a regular visitor to the Hardy household, on the pretext of doing odd jobs for George, but is sent away when one of his mysterious re-arrangements of the household furnishings causes George’s pregnant wife, Annie, to fall ...”

“... Felix found himself delivering a love-note from a student of his father’s to a sublimely naked lady who had probably served as the model for one of Holbein’s Madonnas; he himself, Ladurie notes, had a handsome nose of the Holbein persuasion, the sort that can become ‘the decisive argument’ of the painted face. Nor was it just the learning, the ...”

“... boy from Ireland suddenly surrounded by lots of posh people’. It makes you wonder why Lord and Lady Wilde paid those school fees. Merlin Holland’s essay on his grandfather in Peter Raby’s Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde illuminates these appropriations by charting a series of significant errors through multiple versions of Wilde’s history. Holland ...”

“... than Dublin. In Dublin he had soon become involved not only in singing circles – the Italian lady who taught him believed she had ‘found a successor to Campanini’, the celebrated Italian tenor – but also in the business of politics and electioneering. He had natural skills for both. For the rest of his life he would tell stories of the great ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”