“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In a second volume, he proposes to discuss Anna Karenina, The Scarlet Letter, The Good Soldier and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, among other books; they will hardly afford him opportunities to say much more. So the novel, like bourgeois marriage, its central theme, has its emotional limits. Within them, it will enact the themes of property and family, the great ...”

“... unfailing wit and laconic accuracy: ‘The ground in front of the Metropole was being dug up by lady road-menders,’ and the like. Equally intrusive are a number of gnomic remarks, by no means as lucid as Mrs Fitzgerald’s obiter dicta, though no less confident: ‘love depended on the ability to like oneself and required an understanding of eternal ...”

“... this, but lets the ignorant heroine attend the infertility clinic for a year before some friendly lady gynaecologist breaks the male conspiracy of lies. Sadie’s rebellion is to fake cancer and have her left breast removed. The cruel inversion of male-pandering cosmetic surgery properly mortifies Tim, whom Sadie takes – wrongly, as a final irony reveals ...”

“... for his wife and any children.On Æthelred’s death in 911, his wife Æthelflæd became ‘the Lady of the Mercians’, as Adams puts it, and the last independent ruler of Mercia. With her brother, King Edward of Wessex, she co-ordinated a campaign to reconquer Danish Mercia, and Edward’s son Æthelstan (called ‘the Victorious’ by the Vikings) at ...”

“... as themselves a fiction which cannot apply even to fictional life. An amusingly gothic old lady, Miss Maud, forms an instance of a person removed from normality by her insistence on privacy: ‘The only way to be free is to create a world of one’s own.’ Ruth sees the need finally for realistic self-appraisal held in a steadying balance with ...”

“... idealist working for socialism, but a more hurtfully divided personality for whom the conceit of lady-killing may have been a needful stimulus. To inquire into these things is not to pry indecently, but to seek better understanding of human nature in politics, the terms on which man holds, fumblingly, his tenure as a political being. They relate to both his ...”