“... of episodes from many pages back. That parachuting dog lands in the back garden of an aristocratic lady, where the remaining nuns from María’s order are living secretly in outhouses. It is the ‘Miracle of the Puppy in the Garden’, proof to the nuns that God smiles on their clandestine convent. Such connections are desultory and without special ...”

“... middle-aged woman attempts to impregnate herself using pilfered sperm. And in ‘The Former First Lady and the Football Hero’, perhaps her most ambitious story, Homes depicts Nancy Reagan visiting online chat rooms so that she can experience anonymity. Why has she resorted to such threadbare territory here? This is Homes’s first novel in six years, and ...”

“... Romantic creativity than an inescapable chore. Goodman’s study is a cultural history of the ‘lady of letters’. From 1660, French cultural theorists drew a distinction between letters and other kinds of writing, linking the former to ladies of birth. ‘Whereas all writing had previously been considered primarily a male occupation, letter-writing now ...”

“... 28: she has read a few advanced books and ‘has unjustly acquired a reputation for being a young lady with ideas’, declares Yourcenar. The author follows their engagement trip and honeymoon travels, through Central Europe, Italy and France, with an almost envious enjoyment. She seems to want to be ‘a member of the wedding’. Yourcenar knew her father ...”

“... ironic explorations of narrative omniscience and deflected truth-seeking is uncomfortable. ‘Our Lady of Paris’, one of the two long stories woven from more contemporary material – wealthy sophisticated Pakistanis, educated in America, connoisseurs of old Europe – is full of good things but doesn’t quite bite: partly because it’s set in a France ...”

“... was also a superb listener, notorious on walks or wartime marches for stopping every old peasant lady or charcoal burner to ask for their opinion and biography. As he wrote about himself, ‘ever since I could remember, my boredom threshold had been so high that it scarcely existed at all … I was unboreable, like an unsinkable battleship.’ Unboreable and ...”

“... into something we already know. Aubrey, always unmarried, saved some of his most fervent prose for Lady Venetia Stanley, ‘a most beautifull, desireable Creature’, and the subject of endless court gossip: ‘a most lovely sweet turn’d face, delicate darke browne haire … her face, a short ovall, darke-browne eie-browe: about which much sweetness, as also ...”

“... I hung my head, dropped my shoulders and tried to feel wrecked. ‘Are you all right?’ a kind lady at the next table asked. I had to admit I was. But what of Jones? Would he recover? How long would it take? ‘Snow Storm – Steam-boat off a Harbour’s Mouth’ (c.1842) ‘The Blue Rigi, Sunrise’ (1842) ‘Rain, Steam and Speed – the Great Western ...”

“... on the grounds that one could hardly ‘expect Madame Karsavina to appear as Eve. A married lady! But she won’t hear of it!!’ In due course Lambert was to become artistic director of the Vic-Wells (later Sadler’s Wells, and later still the Royal Ballet), and its regular conductor. Lloyd quotes various testimonials to his brilliance as a dance ...”

“... Eagleton as George McGovern’s running mate. The Shrivers’ daughter Maria was later First Lady of California as the wife, subsequently estranged, of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Edward Kennedy thought his moment had come in 1980, when an opportunity seemed to open to topple the sitting president, a weakened Jimmy Carter, from the Democrat ...”

“... the state claim millions of adherents. More than a million people have visited the shrine of the Lady of the Realm, Ba Chua Xu, in southern Vietnam every year since the early 1990s: religion seems to offer the solace that the state can no longer provide, given the economic, social and cultural dislocations of the market economy. Buddhist monks in Hue ...”

“... began to take their own lives in droves towards the middle of the 18th century – in 1759 Lady Montagu called it a ‘fashion’ – but this striking development certainly wasn’t caused by a lack of social integration, or by what George Cheyne, in a bestselling book of 1733, diagnosed as The English Malady, a melancholy he attributed to the effects ...”

“... One Sunday​ in October 2017, a crowd gathered outside Our Lady, Queen of Polish Martyrs church, in the eastern Warsaw neighbourhood of Grochów. They were there to see the unveiling of a commemorative plaque: ‘In Memory of the 200,000 Poles Murdered in Warsaw in the German Death Camp KL Warschau.’ Flanked by two soldiers, the plaque was sprinkled with holy water by a priest and then saluted by an army officer, who laid a wreath ...”

“... small sloping eyes.’ Where there is humour, it’s often very dark. Black tells of an old lady murdered for her pension by her carer, who turned herself in to the police twenty years later. She told them where to find the torso and limbs, but confessed she’d kept the head wrapped in plastic in her potting shed. ‘Most cases end up with a ...”

“... Romeo and Juliet, The Widow of an Indian Chief watching over the arms of her deceased husband, The Lady in Milton’s Comus and other pictures essentially literary in their inspiration. Here the provincial label really does fail to stick: but the pictures also have little of the strangeness which makes so many of the others memorable. In his landscape ...”