“... him an educational book which he humbly requests the old man to pass on to his daughter. It is Lady Chatterley’s Lover: but Seven does not want his girl to read all that stuff. He has written in the margins loving messages taken from the works of Shakespeare. Kole Omotoso seems to express a mood of yearning for the old innocent days of the Colony and ...”

“... be a pimp, how to start up as a prostitute, how to get a free breakfast if you are a shopping-bag lady. This is truly life without enlightenment, and although unhappy childhoods are presented as extenuating circumstances for the three protagonists and their gutter existence, one feels brutalised by the fact that any kind of alternative is totally ...”

“... Harold Evans does at least refer to), especially now. ‘What would you pay to get all of Lady Fuddington off page three, sport?’ Or as John Walter’s man Finey used to say, pocketing the guineas, ‘Give me a few more, and by St Patrick I will knock out the brains of anyone in our office who dares ever whisper your name.’ Much of the book is ...”

“... biography, her heroic generosity and toughness – lie beneath these brilliant accounts of Lady Byron (arrogant and devious), Countess Tolstoy (‘devoted one minute, embattled the next’), and Pasternak’s jealous mistress Olga Ivinskaya. But they are not allowed to surface: only the dryest of comments implies the point of view: ‘Olga’s jealousy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the marriage stakes is William Ashcombe. At the age of 17, he ‘was much importuned to marry my Lady Garrard’s daughter’ – ‘I saw her and no more.’ At 18, he was offered Kate Howard, but ‘being half afraid of the greatness of her spirit I did not’. At 19, ‘I was wished unto a fine gentlewoman’ – ‘upon further acquaintance I ...”

“... had again made state ownership popular and acceptable that Labour abandoned it’. Nor is the Lady allowed to escape. He quotes her, when a shadow minister of power in the Sixties, giving very cogent reasons why the great utilities, with the possible exception of coal, should remain publicly owned monopolies – as against those in her Party who would ...”

“... her study of the novel in verse Barbara Gelpi has even seen the villainous and sexually predatory Lady Waldemar, who arranges Marian’s abduction and rape, as Aurora’s Jungian ‘shadow’. Certainly Aurora first accepts and then rejects the idea of independent woman plus child represented by Marian, wishing to be ‘low and wise’, ‘less known and less ...”

“... to the Gulf. I find the absence of Bucket ‘n’ Mop or Meat-Packin’ Barbies, let alone Bag Lady or Total Acne Barbies, more predictable than Rand seems to do. Fantasy doesn’t require manipulation to tend upward, even as far as the glass ceiling of female achievement; and a mass-market doll has no call to be an inventory of reality, just as the ...”

“... biographical elements in the text, but they have little to do with its power. The poet and the lady are satirised, but Hardy also endorses their spiritual affinity; they are doomed lovers who achieve an uncanny union through the shadows of words. In a crucial scene, Ella lies in bed reading the phrases and couplets Trewe has left on the wall, ‘the least ...”

“... privilege to examine the secret financial relationships of MPs. Summoning his allies, including Lady Thatcher and Lord Archer in the House of Lords, Hamilton inspired an amendment to the Defamation Act then going through Parliament. The amendment, which was drummed through both Houses by the Tory majority, who behaved exactly as if they were being ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... young man, as we all waited. This was exciting. Was she referring to herself, or to the Persian lady who, I suddenly thought, far from being related to the Shah, might actually be hand-in-glove with mullahs and in a position to hand out death threats? Or was she indeed glamorous deposed royalty, with a personal bodyguard waiting at Heathrow who might do the ...”

“... at the House of Culture in Strasbourg, attended by Tim pretending to be Tom, and escorting Tom’s lady friend, the highly unalluring and modishly counter-cultural Angela De’ath. The exposition of great European Contributors to European thought Was ready, and tomorrow there would be an Official opening. Tim as Tom now ought To schlepp his ass ...”