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“... resent, dislike and try to despise. It is characterisation as assassination, the portrait of a lady who’s already dead, or at least moribund. Poised on the stairs, she’s Lolita’s doomed mother, who is introduced in exactly the same setting, smoking the same cigarette, as ‘a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich’. Béa is a weak solution of Lauren ...”

“... did as she pleased, though she was ruthlessly hard to please. Moore became a cult figure, the old lady in the tricorne hat who threw the first pitch of the baseball season, went to prize fights with George Plimpton, dined with Cassius Clay, as he then was, and was hired, unavailingly, to give a name to a new Ford car. On the whole people think rather little ...”

“... chivalric fiction is binge-watching television. When he considers ‘the matter of wooing a great lady’, he says he naturally ponders ‘the classics’. Such as The Dating Game, ABC-TV, 1965. There are two storylines in Quichotte, located in different layers of fictional reality, although since Rushdie is so good at what we might call the profusion ...”

“... began her cursus with XEclogue (1993), a book of pastoral featuring the ‘roaring boys’, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Nancy the shepherdess, and ‘a pink prosthesis hidden in the forest’. Debbie: An Epic (1997), in which ‘Virgil’s Bastard Daughters Sing’, followed soon after. In 2001, she also published a book-length georgic poem, The ...”

“... the time, in every way a man can miss his wife.’ It’s quite handy for the novel that the first lady is dead, since it makes it marginally easier for the president to go missing (it might have been difficult to give his wife the slip), and emphasises his heroism; it’s also convenient for his executive grip on the narrative that she isn’t around to ...”

“... know we are watching. Written in an unknown hand on an early, c.1484 black chalk drawing of a Lady Carrying a Hawk is the note: ‘This is also old. Albrecht Dürer did it for me, before he entered Wolgemut’s house to become a painter, up in the top attic of the back quarters of the house, in the presence of the late Konrad ...”

“... or married man to have a secret super-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady seems to me to be deliberate infidelity.’ He decides that she will have to read everything he writes; no more secrets. She, though, is keeping a secret from him. To ‘prevent mutual recriminations in the future’, she agrees to see his doctor. But what ...”

“... mayor Fran Reiter admits, ‘you know as well as I do that if some homeless person, some bag lady, walks into Tiffany’s, they are not going to let her use the toilet.’ Often, you will have to spend money in a place before the staff will give you the code or a key: ‘These toilets are for customer use only.’ Shopping centres tend to signpost their ...”

“... mayor of the city. Eventually, she entered the House of Lords as a life peer – calling herself Lady Trumpington – and Mrs Thatcher made her a minister in the Department of Health. And they all lived happily ever after, except for Barker, who had a stroke and died in the 1980s. She claims in the first paragraph of Chapter 1 that, ‘quite ...”

“... capitalism or the Olympics?Last night Allaround and her team defeated a super-strong bank-robbing lady called Bludgeon. More important – in Allaround’s eyes – she asked her teammate Magefist to prom. Magefist is an awkward, recently transitioned trans girl. She gets her own superpowers from a magical gauntlet that lets her control a floating extra ...”

“... spread about a marriage that would have made Winifred in fact what she was in effect, the First Lady of Nazism; even members of the Führer’s circle, even his secretary, thought the couple were having an affair, gossiping about Hitler’s ‘Bayreuth Treatment’ – a view Hamann dismisses out of hand. Whether consummated or not, the relationship was ...”

“... and each line contains the name of a flower, a tree, a fruit, a reference to game, a famous old lady and the word ‘bathtub’: ‘In the apple tree Queen Mary of the Chrysanthemums shared a grape rook bathtub with her insect lamp.’ In a simpler form, this approach worked well with groups of children. In Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to ...”

“... be normal and give a man a level playing-field, a fair break. He was like a gambler convinced that lady luck will be on his side, depending on a profound misunderstanding of the nature of probability. Crane calls his planning ‘brinkmanship’. Scott blamed ‘Providence’, a curious Edwardian compromise between a Victorian God who manages the affairs of men ...”

“... thanks to her cruel parents, a key character’s sister in The Priest of Evil is an alcoholic bag lady who ‘won’t live much longer’. Jo Nesbø’s The Redbreast bucks the trend – but only because it adheres too rigidly to other Scandinavian thriller conventions. Nesbø’s hero, Harry Hole, is an off-the-peg maverick detective whose alcoholism and ...”

“... I Have Known, All Souls in My Time and so on; not to mention his fixation on the Dark Lady). No such luck. Ollard is a careful biographer and does his best with the early years (when Rowse was an unsuccessful Labour Party candidate in Cornwall, struggling with illness and writing imaginative local history). But it is only the elderly Rowse who ...”