“... 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 ...”

“... catastrophe was that he survived.The first disaster is the condemnation of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936, experienced by him as a prelude to the Great Purges, when he feared an arrest that never came. The novel’s first scene has Shostakovich hovering in the evening by the lift outside his apartment, suitcase packed, so as not to be ...”

“... felt that they were farming him out to ‘kennels’. Sometimes he was looked after by a cleaning lady called Mrs Bacon, a News of the World reader who gossiped about suicide and ‘cut brown bread so thinly that its fibres had to be bonded by slabs of butter’. In the school holidays he was sent to stay with various uncles and aunts (‘Uncle Hank and Uncle ...”

“... Bengal’s cultural blend when she visits the ‘country-born’ – i.e. mixed-race – ‘young lady’ in the room next door: ‘Judge my surprise, Arabella, when … I found her … actually smoking a pipe.’ Hookah-smoking was one of the most obviously ‘orientalised’ (Sophia’s term) habits of Britons in India, and would later be phased out in ...”

“... trust. Atovmyan claims to have witnessed more than a hundred performances of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth before the fateful Bolshoi performance attended by Stalin in January 1936 which led to the work’s denunciation in Pravda. Shostakovich was himself in Moscow that day on his way to a concert in Archangel. Shortly before leaving to catch his ...”

“... and about his reading, which was more adventurous than one might have expected. It included Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses and Du côté de chez Swann. A word of mild and, as experience suggests, useless complaint about these volumes as physical objects. They are heavy and tightly bound – presumably to save space by reducing margins. You need both ...”

“... just professional courtesy (or pious conformism). Why should it be ‘insightful’ to focus on Lady Catherine de Bourgh in order to ‘discover’ that Austen represents ‘a series of extremely powerful women each of whom acts out the rebellious anger so successfully repressed by the heroine and the author’, the latter of whom ‘quietly and forcefully ...”

“... it was difficult to be sure what image best captured the brooding presence of the eponymous Lady. If she appeared to the Tory faithful as a painfully nostalgic evocation of the glory days, this may remind us that the average age of party members is currently 67. If she inspired Labour to suggest that an otherwise dull election was fraught with ...”

“... per household. Each year, Trychay would tell the assembled parishioners: ‘Now how many of our Lady scheppe be dede and gon this ere: and how many there be as yett a lyfe and yn hoo ys kepyng they be now schall ye have knolyge of’ (or ‘ye schall hyre’, or ‘y wyll schow you’). As the vicar conducted the annual sheep count around the parish, ‘a ...”