“... sort of person from Richard Hoggart, ‘the grammar school extramural lecturer’ who at the Lady Chatterley trial succeeded, to the amazement and amusement of Our Age, in putting down ‘the Treasury counsel from Eton and Cambridge’. The single most irritating thing about this book is the constant prosopopoeic repetition of the expression ‘Our ...”

“... and so on). Music is also a source of happiness: ‘I played “Slippery People” and “Lady Marmalade” three times each,’ said Archie. ‘The thing that bugs me about listening to my records is that nobody ever sees me when I’m happy, and if they did they wouldn’t understand.’ Archie, age 24, is still a dependent. He gets along well with ...”

“... vast stone edifice filled with Scribes and Pharisees: it is an intimate domestic interior. The old lady behind the boy is in a bed, perhaps a day-bed – you can see bed-curtains, not to mention a night-cap; she is conceivably Joseph’s mother, Rachel, who bore him very late in life (though she was actually dead by this stage of Joseph’s existence). The ...”

“... weakened it (‘I always thought we went a bridge too far’), but it was the conclusive line. Lady Browning was not satisfied, however; according to her, Dirk Bogarde, playing her husband, said it in a murmur. On his retirement from the Army Boy was appointed Comptroller of Princess Elizabeth’s household and spent the rest of his working life at ...”

“... largely abandons differences between women for duplicity within: though her lively account of Lady Audley’s Secret and East Lynne does suggest ‘the doubleness at the heart of Victorian constructions of proper womanhood’, only the general impulse to deconstruct fictions of female sameness and identity appears to link this argument with the rest. An ...”

“... chapter, on the Balunda plebiscite, describes the end of. Two characters have an interest in Lady Butler, the Victorian military painter, and much of the plot gathers around the comical but sinister figure of Colonel Rimington, who stayed on in Balunda after Independence to become a henchman of the new dictator. When he reappears in Europe, with a ...”

“... an unwanted respectability. There were also fears that macho Dylan fans (those who believe ‘Lay Lady Lay’ to be the jewel in the canon) would not tolerate feminist questioning of Dylan’s love-songs. In the event, these anxieties were unfounded, apart from one or two spluttering interventions. The meeting of two different kinds of preoccupation with ...”

“... security. Because Ivanov, an attaché at the Soviet Embassy, had also been involved with the lady in the case, ergo in Labour’s view Profumo was a security risk. Mr Profumo was inexcusably at fault in lying about his association with Christine Keeler. But of all the lies that have been told in the House of Commons, Jack Profumo’s denial of any ...”

“... until his terminal illness and the great success of 1984. Connolly tended to implore the previous lady to take him back after it was too late. He and Barbara Skelton quarrelled violently in the car on the way to their wedding and their way back from it; and he was soon desperately telegraphing Lys to come and rescue him. The redoubtable Barbara, who had been ...”

“... just seen his mistress through a bad abortion, the other writing two letters daily to the young lady who was about to ditch him for a (rather younger) member of his Cabinet. However, though his positions are more defensible, since they allow him to claim less in practice than he hints at in theory, they do not actually help Clarke answer his ‘question of ...”

“... myself’: also she wanted the messenger alive, to hear from him that Octavia was old and ugly. Lady Macbeth would have killed Duncan as he slept, except that he resembled her father; she did at least incriminate the grooms by smearing them with blood, though later she was troubled with thick-coming fancies that kept her from her rest. And in real, recent ...”

“... unofficial reports appear, ‘all absolve Samuel of any wrong-doing’; and the chapter ends with Lady Donaldson’s conclusion that Samuel ‘was free from all blame unless one attaches blame to loyalty’. The view that Asquith and Samuel saved the political careers of Lloyd George and Isaacs, with most fortunate results for Britain, is reinforced by the ...”

“... The most interesting moment of In Bed with Madonna shows the star before a mirror, her make-up lady hovering at her shoulder. Face white, blank, hair-piece cosied on her skull like the top of a cottage loaf, she waits for experience to be layered over the impersonation of innocence; she could, you think, become anything at all. Madonna says: ‘I will be a ...”

“... freed from the tiresome necessity of ever doing any real work. Amanda Cross’s Kate Fansler is a lady of private means and an English professor at Columbia to boot, so that is her excuse for living the life of Reilly. But both Wilson and Dunant’s heroines are unattached bohemians who have the street-credible attitudes of the poor, while appearing to live ...”

“... of people go misty-eyed at the romantic memories conjured by a few bars of Chris De Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’; it’s still a frightful song. What Marcus has put his finger on, if only his book didn’t end here, is that what looks like democracy is really only meretriciousness. People like Elvis because he gave them nothing to fear (though since his death ...”