“... in an ancient pram. The naked man wrapped in his inadequate eiderdown. The teetering albino-blonde lady in cylindrical black, regular as a tramcar in her solipsistic excursions; remarkable in that she doesn’t have an accompanying pet, just the feeling that one is missing, that she pauses, drops a shoulder, sets her pace to accommodate this absence. There is ...”

“... with ideas that belong to his Cambridge youth, but some are still vigorously alive: ‘To an Old Lady’, for instance, and ‘Camping Out’ and ‘Arachne’, ‘Legal Fiction’, and the beautiful ‘Villanelle’ which begins ‘It is the pain, it is the pain, endures.’ (Empson remarks with customary generosity on the technical superiority over his own ...”

“... structures. Is the Spanish dolor ‘pain’ or ‘sorrow’ in English? Well, there is Our Lady of Sorrows, but you would need to speak to the doctor about your pain. How should we render a subjunctive which is not exactly a conditional, as in a phrase like ‘cuando yo me muera’? ‘When I die’ doesn’t catch any of it, but ‘if I should ...”

“... direct sales concerns like the Realsilk Hosiery Company, Stanley Home Products and the ‘Avon Lady’. Avon, a cosmetics company, changed the gender dynamics by employing women to sell to women in the home. The ‘hostess party’ was the next step – a social gathering that was also an opportunity for selling. Here the pioneer was Wearever ...”

“... which added propulsion to his ambition and opportunism. First, he had histrionic acting abilities, Lady Clobery describing him as ‘fitter to make a player than a clergyman’. Second, there was the timbre of his voice, much remarked on by contemporaries, which enabled him to entrance a congregation with the deceptively sweet sound of his tirades. However ...”

“... dressed in a Soviet-made polka-dot shirt and a large furry coat, and was better versed in ‘The Lady with the Lapdog’ than Star Wars or The Dukes of Hazzard. Igor/Gary was soon handed over to the butchers at Coney Island Hospital to be circumcised. (Nina’s defence: ‘We were told to do it.’) Igor/Gary’s classmates hit him because they hated ...”

“... about it. In the UK press’s coverage of the public mood, too little has been heard from ‘the lady up there on the right’, as David Dimbleby called her. Her perception that MPs have behaved more like idiots than scoundrels is reassuringly clear-headed and proportionate to this weird affair. Meanwhile the Telegraph, vaingloriously drunk on its own ...”

“... male counterpart, just as devious, just as heated. He’s no gentleman, but then she’s no lady. Beguiled by Ashley, dismissive of sexual desire and apparently hostile to the idea of motherhood, Scarlett resists him. These passions play out through the apocalypse of the American Civil War, a conflict that calls on all Scarlett’s resources as she ...”

“... but we don’t have any real doubt about her sex: just about her age (she could be a little old lady or an infant), and about anything she says (her drawling jargon could give anti-elocution lessons to us all). Her smooth, moon-round face, her neat corn-rows, her slumped posture, generate an air of innocence, totally contradicted by her affectless ...”

“... as developments towards a late style – there’s even a bizarre final-act revelation involving a lady draped in ‘the hijab’, which could make sense only in a Winter’s Tale-type romance. Let’s begin, though, with a wave in the direction of some good bits. On what ageing does to the skin of the middle-class male body: As you pass the half-century, the ...”

“... Its choices often seem perverse: in September 2006, Jean-Philippe Tessé passionately defended Lady in the Water, a world-class dud by the self-aggrandising Hollywood mystic M. Night Shyamalan; while the Cahiers critics’ top feature of 2002 (along with Abbas Kiarostami’s groundbreaking Ten) was Choses secrètes by Jean-Claude Brisseau, a veteran ...”

“... when you had to deal with the homosexual side of his nature?’ Young asked. ‘No, not really,’ Lady Spender replied. ‘No, I didn’t.’ Time was when the matter might have rested there. But there are always the children, and the children’s children. It turns out that Matthew Spender, the first of Spender’s two ankle-biters, is something of a psychic ...”

“... pours.’ On quiet evenings they enjoyed the Benny Hill Show. By the end of their lives Lord and Lady Snow had become a half-comical duo, not at home in a new world (‘the left was going all wrong on the cultural front’) and easily parodied. It was Olivia Manning’s inspiration to call them the Snows of yesteryear, and John Bird and Eleanor Bron sent ...”

“... years and his characters, especially Maudie, Countess of Littlehampton, Mrs Frogmarch the Tory lady and Canon Fontwater, played out the range of topical problems from the Cold War to the extremes of 1960s fashion. ‘Tell me, dear child,’ Maudie asks her pelmet-wearing daughter at Ascot, ‘which particular horse did you put your skirt on?’ The white ...”

“... physical touch – an experiment that John Malkovich tried as Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady (1997). Ryan’s monsters are always situated within the bounds of the probable. You can feel the depth of his achievement if you set him alongside two leading actors, Robert Mitchum and John Wayne, who bore a family resemblance to his masculine type in the ...”