“... Rainy Dawn’ and dated 1945, which struck me then and since as the equal of Chekhov’s ‘Lady with Lapdog’.We are on a Volga steamer. It’s night. The boat puts in for three hours at one of Paustovsky’s tiny nowhere places (what’s the Russian for ‘podunk’?) called Navoloki. Just long enough to allow the central figure, a Major Kuzmin, who ...”

“... experimental novels. Born in 1903 into a well-to-do West Country family, she was a student at Lady Margaret Hall, graduating in 1927. After Oxford, she moved to London, and in 1931 into a flat at 107 Lansdowne Road, Notting Hill. There’s a rare sighting of her, a diminutive figure flanked by solemn men in suits, in a photograph in the March 1933 issue ...”

“... contrition! We are druv’ to it. John Bull will have it so. Tu l’as voulu John Dandin! And his lady still more! Let us toe the line, my brothers, and invest with care. Londres vaut bien une messe.’ Then catch at your own coat-tails. ‘An unpardonable digression! I am like a bus driver who is perpetually jumping down to fight some passer-by. I apologise ...”

“... Russell in his autobiography gives no casus belli, but there was disharmony from the start between Lady Russell and Barnes, who liked to instruct her on how to bring up her three-year-old child. The unforeseeable tipping point turned out to be her habit of knitting (for the allied troops) during her husband’s lectures. She received an official reprimand from ...”

“... of pain about the postwar decline of ‘civilisation’ in a country where ‘the more one’s a lady or a gentleman the less chance one has.’Both radical hopes and reactionary fears were confounded by events, and the differences between Labour and Tory were often narrower than they seemed at the time. The Attlee government created the NHS, but Churchill ...”

“... set during the First World War, the other a comedy thriller in the manner of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. But both are elevated by the light, ironic style of Pressburger’s script and by the hulking presence of Conrad Veidt, another exile from the Nazis, who had appeared in German silent movies. (Veidt wasn’t Jewish but, as Caitlin McDonald writes ...”

“... bright’, was brought up an only child in Gloucestershire, the daughter of ‘a real Cheltenham lady’. ‘They were very different people, my parents.’ On holiday in the Pyrenees in 1962 the differences are not on show, except perhaps in his mother’s sideways glance away from the camera. His father, a keen birdwatcher, has his field glasses round his ...”

“... in line 11. Elsewhere, she points out various numerological moments (the total of the ‘dark lady’ sonnets is 28, which reflects male disgust with the lunar, menstrual, cycle alluded to in their number, and I would guess that the number 33 is chosen as a trinal number which picks up the reference to ‘heaven’s sun’ – i.e. Christ. Vendler ...”

“... if Larkin’s your man, in 1963 – a year before Top of the Pops – and off the back of the Lady Chatterley trial and the Beatles’ first LP. But the intermediaries, too, were now part of the strange dance of the permissive with the banned. And it became part of their public profile to thrive at the centre of a doubt about acceptability. That might be ...”

“... of a one-eyed dwarf dressed entirely in pink, or a skull engraved with Old Norse runes sporting a lady barrister’s cap made out of pages … from the Times’. No other art from the same period insists so calmly and completely on its unassimilablity to conventional canons of the normal, the insightful, the informative, or even the sane. Eventually and very ...”

“... of the men who did survive were disgraced: Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, husband of the fashion designer Lady Lucile, was said to have resorted to bribery to make it into a lifeboat; Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line, claimed that an officer more or less urged him to take a place – others said he pushed his way in. Neither lived down the fact that ...”

“... and ham sandwich. ‘Pretty good,’ he said. Then he leaned over to me, whispering. ‘That lady hates us.’‘Were you busy earlier on?’ I asked her.‘Packed,’ she said. ‘The workers and the schoolkids, just by.’‘Where do the young people go for nights out?’ Karl said.She looked at him as if human nature were always biting at her ...”

“... in those days. Me, I’d rather be in a dentist’s chair than go to one of those things where the lady poet whispers in her breathless little lady-poet voice about how come she’s so out of sorts and about granny’s mouldering petticoat in the attic, this sort of drivel. But the poet-boy, he’s worse still, striking this ...”

“... all accounts, Rose was difficult to live with (Schwartz’s childhood friends called her Lady Macbeth). Harry often abandoned the family home for periods and in 1923 packed up for good, moving to Chicago. Afterwards, worried that Delmore was becoming a ‘violin’ of his mother’s ‘sick emotions’, he offered to buy his son from Rose for ...”

“... contribution brief: he had not sold God short and even allowing for the saxophone solo and the old lady currently in full, if tiny, voice it had never ceased to be a church service. Treacher had come along hoping to find Father Jolliffe a bit of a clown and over-anxious to please. There had been no evidence of that and he deserved credit. Canon Treacher folded ...”