“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sant’Andrea della Valle, or is it the clean mallet-percussion of John Pawson’s Abbey of Our Lady of Nový Dvůr? There’s an organist in the loft; what is he playing? The concerto then becomes a twenty-minute exploration of this space: walking into a church, and slowly moving closer and closer, past various side chapels and distractions, towards the ...”

“... unsatisfactory about the way it sounds; perhaps my difficulty with it has something to do with Lady Archer. There are names within the novel, too, that Lanchester seems to have not quite worked out what to do with: it would be fine to give London’s newspapers aliases such as the Toxic, the Serious and the Sentinel, and it isn’t a bad joke, only it ...”

“... into streams and how to kill sentries noiselessly from behind.’ There would be no quarter for ‘lady finger-breakers’ joining up to any amazon corps. The drivel pouring out of Hamburg was easily discounted, yet there must have been not a few who remembered how the Germans treated francs-tireurs and their protectors in 1914. At Dinant, in Belgium, there is ...”

“... bred this precarious civility. But there is enough unpalliated horror in the chapter about the Lady Doctor: we hear of a baby without an anus, left in an outhouse (euphemism for latrine) to die, and of the box of clean ashes placed beside the birth bed in case the baby was a girl: suffocation by the midwife or a relative was ‘very easy’. The account of ...”

“... sending material ‘of the most filthy and obscene character’ to Adelaide Fenton, a fashionable lady of Bath who was ‘not in the least acquainted’ with him, charged with the intention to ‘corrupt and debauch’ her. Colonel Forbes fled to France, and a £50 reward was offered for information leading to his arrest, together with a description: ‘about ...”

“... decomposition to the miracles they performed. Pilgrims flocked to relic shrines such as Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk or Santiago de Compostela in Galicia to experience these material manifestations of holiness as intimately as possible. They wanted not just to see the relics but to touch them and kiss them, and they hoped to take home something ...”

“... Ireland, against her husband’s wishes, is reminiscent of Isabel Archer’s in The Portrait of a Lady, when she travels to see the dying Ralph against her husband’s wishes:‘Was he very bad about your coming?’‘He made it very hard for me. But I don’t care.’‘Is it all over, then, between you?’‘Oh, no; I don’t think anything is ...”

“... the world and staying in it. When, late in the book, Jill encounters her grandmother, the old lady suggests she should move on. Maybe it’s time, Grandma said, indicating my grave with her cane … No, I said. Why not, Grandma said. What keeps you here, Doll? What keeps you here? I said. She leaned forward to answer, as if about to tell me some ...”

“... for her own identity’. One doubts whether Sonya saw it like that. She was no West Coast lady, and though she had problems, they were quite different from the problems of Judy Garland and Vivien Leigh, whose lives Ms Edwards has also written. What was she like? The new portrait does not differ from the older ones: she was a lively, pretty, highly ...”

“... one encounters them, even in trifling matters, the more beloved they become, the squire and his lady, the Bacons, the Donnes (descended from the poet), the Du Quesnes, the Howes, his Sister Pounsett, and hundreds more – all immersed in farming and shipping and parties and funerals and talking very little about money. Naturally, Parson Woodforde is at his ...”

“... scrambling of high and low ranks, like the juxtaposition of ‘Pimps, Poets, Wits, Lord Fanny’s, Lady Mary’s’, and I think they indicate more than ‘Pope’s special tendency ... to cast into doubt the proper association of rank with merit, virtue, or even good manners’. They are a matter of putting lords down in lordly language, though in the name of ...”

“... pointed ears. In the Vellati chapel of the Church of Santo Spirito, help is again at hand – Our Lady of Succour is taking a club to a dragon-winged devil covered with orange hair, with a scaly tail and dagger-like canines. He is reaching out a pronged tool to hook a frightened child. So the devil embodies all the wickedness lying in wait for the innocent of ...”

“... 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 ...”