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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the old Conservative working class, an indispensable element of its traditional electorate. And Lady Thatcher bears much of the responsibility for this. The last paradox is that her legacy to the Conservative Party has been so powerful that the party can do nothing about this failed strategy – other than hope for the best. Of the four men who succeeded ...”

“... who taught classics at Charterhouse, was once seen by Osbert Lancaster accompanying Lady Asquith down Bond St, and died a Companion of Honour and a trustee of the Reform Club. Page was an admirable Latinist, independent, commonsensical, and sharply aware of a world outside books. Even when wrong, he was sensible. This was the man whom James ...”

“... such as the history and curriculum of Cambridge University, or life in the Fleet Prison under its lady warden: one of a series of redoubtable women whose careers suggest that while medieval women collectively may, in the modern cliché, have been enjoined to chastity, silence and obedience, individually they rarely attempted more than one. Castor remains ...”

“... he ripped it off and tossed it to the tabloid press like a knight presenting a favour to his lady. Even in the sordid history of crimes against children the murders committed by Hindley . . . were uniquely evil . . . They abducted, terrified, tortured and killed their victims before burying their bodies on Saddleworth Moor . . . Her role in the ...”

“... Yeats, Mr Dermod O’Brien, the President of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, and Lady Gerald Wellesley, the poetess’. In February 1947, my grandparents again made the trip to the South of France, accompanied this time by their teenage daughters. My mother recalled her intense excitement, and the ivory-framed sunglasses and frocks bought for ...”

“... And it was, as Spalding emphasises without too much sentiment, a fitting end for an old lady who may not be most fairly remembered for her part in the mythology of Cambridge croquet mallets, dreary domesticity and early bedtimes. She had, for a while at least, managed to escape the ...”

“... a newspaper advert offering for sale a hatbox of old letters generates a poem to the unknown lady who wrote them, and a Sears, Roebuck catalogue entry an ode to a dressmaker’s dummy. Something of the faux-naif hovers above his diction, as it does Bishop’s, especially in poems that work up a single conceit, such as ‘On the Death of Friends in ...”

“... in my new school.’ Or this strange statement from The Book of Illusions, when the hero’s new lady-friend begins to stroke her breasts, and to trail her fingertips along the inside of her thighs: ‘Hector was not immune to these classic provocations.’ Auster is at his best when he balances the enigmatic and the concrete, as in The Music of Chance ...”

“... the man who wrote to the motoring press urging drivers not to stop after an accident if they had a lady on board was Bernard Shaw. Speed worship began to infect hard-headed urban councils, as one town after another (and not just in Britain) began holding Grand Prix round-the-houses races, or even round-the-houses-and-into-the-trees races. And what sort of ...”

“... a trainee physiotherapist, a renowned doctor who had crossed the Atlantic on a raft, a socialist lady senator, a saxophonist etc. So we prepared for Greene’s visit as usual, although we forgot to put a coathanger in his room (cassocks are not supposed to be hung on coathangers), which apparently embarrassed him. When Greene arrived nobody asked any ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”