“... frizzy hair and a thrift-shop outfit. Thus, we have a couple of archetypal scene-stealers – dog lady and dog – and the slightly stuffy accomplice needed to set them off. It adds up to an entertaining piece of fiction. Virginia Moriconi has written an odd novel about the Irish and Anglo-Irish. Her heroine is a guileless young American academic, named ...”

“... to be used throughout the year, rather than as last-minute revision crammers’.) The British Lady Chatterley trial was not ‘in the 1950s’, and I doubt if many playwrights of the Sixties (or since) would agree that ‘the winning of that case by the publishers marked an effective end to censorship of the arts in Great Britain.’ Perhaps because of ...”

“... herself merry with her own unceremoniousness’? Her brother, after all, had been seducing a young lady in France, where he had lived in a lofty rapture, as he was now doing – though with different ambitions and intentions – with his sister at Alfoxden Park near Nether Stowey. At all times of idealistic fervour it is the women who lose out. Where they are ...”

“... the Matisse poster’), not to mention his Muse (Uta, a tall, blond, good-looking Scandinavian lady whom he meets in Milan), are writing the story in half the chapters, while a group of New Zealand-based characters are enacting it in the other half. One’s first response to such Modernist chic is to find it passé. Still, the strategy makes for a buoyant ...”

“... on the whole runs well, and it is enlivened by pretty quotations. (Chuang-tzu: ‘Men say that the Lady Di is beautiful; but if the fish could see her they would dive to the bottom of the river.’) But it is demanding. Schwartz assumes that you know the geography of China and are reasonably familiar with the outlines of its early history; and he presupposes ...”

“... wonderful light, Bill,’ I said to the Texan next to me. ‘Yes,’ he affirmed; and the Indian lady murmured: ‘Yes.’ Three exiles. No more was said; and the others, Londoners, did not even know what we had understood ... When people ask, I feel like saying ‘It’s a brilliant country; they’re a brilliant people, just at the beginning of the ...”

“... dame of American letters, deferentially hired by Ford to suggest names for new models. The great lady glitters into a world wholly composed of things. ‘I have a knife held by two nails flat to the casing of my kitchen china closet. It has a blade about eight inches long, of high-grade steel, joined to an ebony handle by a collar of brass – trade-marked ...”

“... abode in Surrey. He replied that he only went to stay at other people’s houses with his wife (Lady Dorothy, daughter of the Duke of Devonshire). Silence ensued. He never spent a night at Cherkeley, though he never quarrelled with Lord Beaverbrook. The fascinating problem about the careers of those who get to the top in politics is the turning-point, the ...”

“... particular ethnic group ... At that point a senior member of the Authority, an immensely shrewd lady of normally equable disposition began to remonstrate angrily. She wanted to know how the officer could possibly dare to come before a Committee of the Authority and tell elected members that there were any criteria to be considered other than the quality of ...”

“... cripple than this tough, resourceful, resilient, responsible, dashing, candid and very funny lady; or look less like one. The portrait photograph on the jacket was taken when she was 92: she looks a spry 60, with a squashy Russian nose in a broad Russian face, untidy hair, and a most appealing expression in which serenity and benevolent curiosity ...”

“... but the supporting cast – brilliant willowy Edmund, working-class Marxist Alan, aristocratic Lady Fanthorpe, and so on – are cardboard. The Sixties setting is painted by numbers: dolly-birds and miniskirts, boys that look like ‘Terry’ Stamp, much twisting to early Beatles songs. At its worst, the book’s assertions are either palpably absurd ...”

“... famous trio of this time, William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Devonshire, his wife Georgiana and Lady Elizabeth Foster, concealed their goings-on and their miscellaneous progeny in the grand seclusion of Chatsworth and Devonshire House. Less socially-exalted, the Hamiltons and Nelson were at once more notorious and far more vulnerable. All three were ...”

“... you felt you must be guilty, even though you did not know your crime.’ I asked the elderly lady in the coffee house of the Paris Hotel in Prague what had got better and what had got worse since the velvet revolution. ‘Everything has got worse and will get worse still,’ she replied, ‘except for one thing. For the first time in fifty years I do not ...”

“... it to your father ... He won’t talk about it. It was a wartime thing.’ Although, according to Lady Hickman, formerly Mrs Thatcher, ‘Friends do say we look rather alike,’ Carol explains that her mother detests the comparison, wishing to consign the entire affair to history. Denis’s memory, however, is quite sharp about that period of his life. When ...”

“... much of the documentation of proletarian life stems from sanitary inspectors, settlement workers, lady visitors and other philanthropists whose self-appointed mission to darkest London was to help the poor to become clean and decent, regular and respectable, and who, for that reason, saw them as unkempt, ungodly and unwashed, recklessly filling the world with ...”