“... a decade later it was the NSA that detailed the dénouement in a series of terse despatches: ‘lady ace’ – the Ambassador’s helicopter – ‘is on the roof. he states that he will load 25 pax and that this will leave 45 remaining hence they need more choppers.’ During the Cultural Revolution, the NSA listened in as Red Guards quoted Mao to one ...”

“... Heaney would, I suppose, approve of the angelic turn that Watkins’s verse was to take. In The Lady with the Unicorn (1948) there is an efflorescence of Neo-Platonism and a rather gnostic form of Christianity. The emerging poetic now refines and examines symbols in order to explore elevated states rather than compounding them, the better to inter the poet ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and convert to Christianity), and is rescued from despair when he fathers the child of a ‘loving lady chimpanzee’: ‘In sum, a worthy primate evolution demanded, besides a few macroevolutionary lucky breaks, a basis of brainpower; and commencing with a combination of man-chimp child, the two most intelligent of God’s creatures might produce this new ...”

“... for William Paget, one of the King’s Councillors. Two years later, he managed to secure for Lady Cobham the cinnamon she wanted, but failed to source black satin from Venice. Writing to Lord Cobham in 1546 about the possibility of English merchant shipping being menaced by French warships out of Dieppe, he included ‘a little clout with needles’ for ...”

“... returned from India in 1619, Roe was still only 38. Thereafter accompanied by his intrepid wife, Lady Eleanor, he subsequently spent seven years during the 1620s as the Levant Company’s ambassador to the Ottoman court in Constantinople, followed by diplomatic missions to Denmark, Poland and the Holy Roman Empire amid the convulsions of the Thirty ...”

“... to look.’ Elizabeth Sampson, hauled before the bishop of London, put it more succinctly: Our Lady of Willesden ‘was a brent ars Elfe’. But as bishops went hunting through parishes for heresy, they also found people who held the old ways disturbingly close, with a fervent belief in the power of ritual words. In 1520, Henry Lillyngstone was charged by ...”

“... like Girls to be glad about the stories that were possible in its wake: onscreen there is Fleabag, Lady Bird, Hacks, Sorry, Baby, Insecure, Shiva Baby; on the page there is Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani, Jia Tolentino; in music there is Charli XCX, Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski. A commercial vein was opened in which it’s OK to be a girl, to mess around with your ...”

“... his own successful elopement story in reverse, like a counterfactual thought experiment. A married lady sits by her window and catches the eye of the handsome Duke: ‘She looked at him, as one who awakes, – /The past was a sleep, and her life began.’ But no sooner has life begun than they have both started to find reasons to put it off for the time ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Banking. She became the ‘village elder’ for younger colleagues: ‘She could be kind of a fat lady with big hair and a bohemian, but she was trying to do the right thing for the right reasons,’ her boss admitted. Life in New York was cold, hard and expensive. Soon she fled back to Jakarta for a better paying job with the Indonesian State Ministry for ...”

“... house where I lived for nearly fifty years. Not a bit of it is the truth, with the filming of The Lady in the Van two years ago more the real conclusion. Now the house looks much as it did when I first saw it in 1968, though then there were perches for parrots in the garden and one in the bay window, with upstairs gas meters in every room as during the war it ...”