“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a long passage in which Mencken celebrates the charming effect of a woman’s conversation. The lady in question has ‘a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice’ that talks of anything and everything, but ‘No politics. No business. No religion. No metaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious.’ The female chatter is so gentle and soothing that the male ...”

“... deal. He complained that the media exaggerate the violence in the city. ‘One day a rich Kurdish lady was kidnapped,’ he said. ‘They claimed she was a female Kurdish leader. In fact it was just an ordinary kidnapping.’ He conceded that many Arab police officers were probably collaborating with the insurgents and that several Arab police chiefs had been ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... being for crying out loud.’ A maid reassures her interlocutor: ‘Your grandmother was a kind lady, not like the people I used to work for before.’In one monologue the host of a radio show observes that ‘there are numerous varieties of Lagos accents from the posh to the unvarnished and there are accents inflected with the residue of various native ...”

“... in itself. The curator has small silver paws, very like the paws of the ermine in the painting Lady with Ermine, now on display in the nation’s other museum, which the visiting lecturer had been told was not worth visiting. After the tour, as they exit the storage room, an older man walks beside the curator whispering, Stop blushing, just be ...”

“... June 1949, at the Boeuf sur le Toit cabaret, the beginning of her seven-decade reign as the first lady of French chanson. Both the venue and the song were selected by Gréco’s unlikely svengali, Jean-Paul Sartre. François Mauriac, three years away from his Nobel Prize, was in the audience. So was Marlon Brando. After the concert he gave Gréco a ride home ...”

“... drunk and suggested that they should all burst into the drawing-room and each seize a ‘Sabine’ lady. Burns did so, but ‘the gentry and soldier friends of Riddell acted in feigned horror and Burns was ejected from Friar’s Carse in disgrace.’ Hogg’s details seem embroidered and weakly supported, and he confuses Maria with Elizabeth Riddell. But ...”

“... he had little trouble in locating Britain’s middlebrow. He was curious enough to start reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover and conventional enough to throw it onto the fire when teased about it.The shortcoming of Ridley’s graceful, funny book is simply its form. Even the best royal biographies exaggerate the impact of monarchs on the fortunes of monarchy ...”

“... imagine what would have happened ‘if it had occurred to Lucrece to slap Tarquin’s face’. The lady who performs this virtuous gesture is revealed, in a graceful pay-off at the end, to be rather less chaste than the gesture implies. Her husband, who maintains a Beppo-like complaisance as long (and only as long) as he doesn’t know there is something to be ...”

“... they enjoyed refighting the Reformation. Plays, paintings (famously Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey), new editions of John Lingard’s revisionist History of England, as well as Pugin’s architectural manifesto Contrasts, all treated it as the determining event in national history. The facts were fiercely argued and at a popular level there was ...”

“... Cowper always found it hard to discover in the world was equally obscured in a letter he wrote to Lady Hesketh as the impeachment trial was due to begin in February 1788. In its sweeping, almost sublime gestures, and its descent into nostalgic regret for long lost adolescent loyalties, it bears witness to the small, incestuous world within whose confines ...”