“... by Robert Sterling) for being married to Julie LaVerne (played by Ava Gardner), the leading lady in a riverboat revue who we learn has ‘negro blood’, he pricks her finger, sucks her blood and proclaims that he now has ‘negro blood’ too. In Mississippi, where the boat is docked, not only was interracial marriage a crime and, prima ...”

“... But even now, at some level, I couldn’t accept it: that this courteous and sharp-witted lady was the one who had been, rather reluctantly, photographed with Neal Cassady, and who had herself been responsible for some of the most familiar images of Kerouac and Cassady in archetypal buddy-buddy poses. I guess that I’m temperamentally ill-equipped to ...”

“... the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems – ‘Daddy’, ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘The Applicant’, ‘Fever 103°’ – were ‘beautifully’ read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerising cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been ...”

“... and so to James Bond. Finally the phrase ‘pre-Thatcherite’ enables Dr Morgan to return to the lady in question. This is sleight-of-hand – but for a purpose. The mystique of empire is introduced as a preamble to the success of Mrs Thatcher, a page or two later, in mobilising the forces of popular patriotism. What Dr Morgan has done, with great ...”

“... when he wrote a goodbye letter to his wife he assured her that her successor would also be ‘a ...”

“... enables the author to assemble a good collection of anecdotes and bon mots. One Edwardian Co. Cork lady, for instance, was in the habit of sliding down the stairs on a tray, wearing pink tights, and the wife of a Louth baronet had a passion for donkeys. Boredom during a church service could be alleviated by jabbing with a hatpin at the people in front. The ...”

“... large, ungainly, half-deaf artist’ – shortish, rather plump but neat is the general account. Lady Warkworth’s husband is said to have been ‘created Count Percy’: in fact the Earldom (sic) was conferred on this man’s father, though he used it as a courtesy title. Arthur Murphy is transmogrified into ‘Arthur Murray’, whilst Ms Lesley Lewis ...”

“... another woman was involved. Some assumed it was Dickens’s sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth. This lady suffered the indignity of a virginity test, to disprove what would have been incest as well as adultery. Those closer to Dickens knew better. ‘No such thing – it’s with an actress,’ Thackeray told his mother, adding: ‘It’s a fatal story for our ...”

“... of one artist who still can’t bear to leave: ‘He did well by us, but now he’s like an old lady in the attic. He’s failed but he won’t give up. For us it’s over; the Revolution’s a piece of kitsch.’ Guillermo Cabrera Infante uses the term as well, but for him it’s the ‘kitsch of death’, and his obsession with Cuba’s Castro is a lot ...”

“... quite obviously not enough. It is extraordinary that anyone can have thought, as some followers of Lady Thatcher have thought and perhaps in a few cases still do think, that mere equality in the face of the market could realise enough of an idea of equal citizenship to make anything work, including the market itself. Sen’s theory of equality does yield an ...”

“... available to her ambition is the role of fortune-hunter and knight-errant (she hankers to be ‘Lady Errant’), the mobility that even in romance is reserved for men alone. As she herself concedes when fiercely denying she ‘was seen in man’s apparel ... in designe to do mischief’, she has attempted an impossible crossing of boundaries. McKeon ...”

“... from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who welcomed Strachey, ‘would no more have invited Carrington than the cook’. Knowing her very well, he thought she was a complex and original character in a strange situation, but did not say what effect on her the strange situation had. Dora ...”

“... Henry Ash in a copy of one of Ash’s books in the London Library. The letters address an unknown lady; they are suggestive of intellectual, and perhaps other kinds of passion; and Roland, from motives obscure to himself but none the less compelling, steals them. He does not tell Blackadder; he does not tell Val, the woman with whom he damply and gloomily ...”

“... stunning girl with the blonde halo? Can it be possible she is still alive? So the lovely, fat old lady, resurrected, becomes a staple of film festivals. She is in a position of absolute security. Fame has come too late to bewilder or corrupt; it can only console. She is something better than a star. She is an eternal flame in the holy church of cinema. Brooks ...”

“... episode that almost everyone would consider as in itself sexist, the trick Panurge plays upon the Lady of Paris who refuses his advances? He sprinkles her gown with ground-up pieces of genitals of a bitch in heat and then withdraws to watch the sport, as all the male dogs of Paris assemble to piss on her, head to toe ... Her offence, remember, is simply that ...”