“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”