“... unknowable world in which Henry James is careful to keep Millie Theale, his fabulously rich young lady in The Wings of the Dove. The rich, as Fitzgerald knew, are different from us, and hence ideal inhabitants of the gossip world. The ideal gossiper is an outsider with no hope of penetrating the secrets that absorb him. Dr Spacks says that she and her friend ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... built a gabled house in this Arctic community, and even acquired a wife. ‘My wife is a very nice lady,’ he told me, as a rather cowed-looking figure in a rough woollen dress shuffled about in the background. ‘She runs a store and gives me money every few days.’ ‘Oh, really,’ I said, desperate to clutch at these straws of domesticity. ‘And ...”

“... with the ambassadress of saltpetre Or of the white curve on black ground we call thought … The lady with no shadow knelt on the Pont-au-Change Rue Gît-le-Coeur the stamps were no longer the same Night-time pledges were kept at last Homing pigeons helping kisses Met with the breasts of the lovely stranger Pointing through the crepe of perfect meanings A ...”

“... prejudices of those less fastidious than himself. His story about the (forever unidentified) old lady who had ‘excreta pushed through her letterbox’, also has her being followed to the shops by ‘children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies’. Powell was dismissed from the shadow cabinet. He spent the next two decades on the back benches, from which ...”

“... both accepted imperial honours; his father’s papers were always conservative; Sir Keith and Lady Murdoch (Dame Elisabeth) and the young Rupert lived lives wholly divorced from those of the average Australian; and the elderly Rupert is even more estranged from the ‘people’. But it is a rule of politics: if you wish to deceive others you must first ...”

“... for a pick-up), he would have come face to face, minus pants and trousers, with an elderly lady: one of the few remaining regulars at the baths, who combines her visits, in a not very Victorian way, with a weekly shop at the local Tesco. The book’s finale is a faux pas of a different sort, but in almost the same place; the full circle of the title is ...”

“... Norah knows to be her father. Afterwards, ‘I came out, and sat down with my make-up nice. The lady will have the ice cream, I think.’ The eternal actress. Norah struggles to adjust to this discovery, this whole new past and present: ‘I think about my mother raped. I think about my father, who did not deserve a name. And I do not know how I can ...”

“... by an indigenous mother) and ‘quenching the thirst of the bourgeoisie’ (represented by a pious lady).In Mexico City, everywhere is a place where water used to be. Almost nothing remains of the five lakes the original city was built on, although the memory of water is there in the names of the streets and the highways that were once canals. Twenty-two ...”

“... Law was widely travelled, but the wanderings of this gambler-adventurer and his common law wife, Lady Katherine Knowles, were not entirely voluntary. In 1694 he killed a well-connected gentleman called Edward Wilson in a quarrel in London, and, although he managed to escape from England after a period in jail, he remained for much of his life an outlaw in ...”

“... Present in the Muppet Christmas Carol. His friend Mary Gaskell was sent drawings of ‘The Fat Lady’, who in her black dress resembles a monumental tadpole, wriggling on a sofa or wallowing in a hammock. But his talent for line is also evident across the paintings: in the thorny branches that weave tortuously through the Briar Rose series, or loop the ...”