“... instant Azhar turned his head, Big Billy called, ‘Hey! Why ain’t you lookin’ at us, little lady?’ She twisted round and waved at the conductor standing on his platform at the far end of the bus. But a passenger got on and the conductor followed him upstairs. The few other passengers, sitting like statues, were unaware or unconcerned. Mother turned ...”

“... entirely in terms of theatrical prestige, who’s higher up the ladder. First Vivien, as a leading lady, then Harold, as a star playwright. ‘Life is an endless battle for positions,’ Billington quotes Pinter as saying, and neither of these seems to have doubted this proposition for a-moment. ‘For what Pinter grasps is that life is a series of ...”

“... of Evita by society and the military is staged as a series of choruses out of a Latin My Fair Lady, and another essential feature of the Eva myth is put across: if you thought she was awful, you should see the folks who disapproved of her. It all gets a little desultory after that, partly because Jonathan Pryce has decided to play Perón as just a nice ...”

“... the music of what doesn’t happen. Suspense is not Maxwell’s game. His idea of a shock is a bag lady finding a copy of Sartor Resartus in a Manhattan trash can. You think: Thomas Carlyle! On East End Avenue! Wild! Passages in All the Days and Nights suggest the earnest exposition of a local historian: ‘The business district of Draperville, Illinois ...”

“... King Cole’, the Browning parody is perhaps the funniest: Who smoke-snorts toasts o’ My Lady Nicotine, Kicks stuffing out of Pussyfoot, bids his trio Stick up their Stradivarii (that’s the plural). But the Swinburne is the most loving – it is, indeed, beautiful:    In the time of old sin without sadness And golden with wastage of gold ...”

“... if it were to engage all levels of life:What, you want action?Some attraction? ...Someone singsA lady of almost any ageBut chiefly breast and rings‘Throw your arms around me – Aint you glad you found me.’The contemptuous third-person sketch – ‘chiefly breast and rings’ – is what Eliot will avoid in The Waste Land’s ‘A Game of ...”

“... one of those sealed capsules by which future generations are supposed to know us. ‘Red China. Lady Docker. The Goon Show ... A-bomb.’ The story, hobbled by these overloud hints, ‘lurches back to the present’. That’s where it is told, that’s where the pain has to be understood. A splinter from the past is always flying towards an unsuspecting ...”

“... of the Chandler-scripted Blue Dahlia and two more Marlowe films – Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake, and the Hawks/Faulkner/Bogart/Bacall Big Sleep – Chandler was rich and famous. Under the pressure of Hollywood social life and the Wilder collaboration (which Hiney calls Chandler’s first close human contact with anyone other than Cissy in a ...”

“... Mrs C. came in with her niece this morning and kissed me on the cheek! She is an elderly lady whom I first saw three months ago, one of the old and vulnerable whom the war has tipped back into illness. From what I could piece together she had had a manic episode ten years ago followed by a bout of depression. On her first visit to me she was not ...”

“... about breast-feeding. When David Copperfield is introduced to Mrs Micawber, ‘a thin and faded lady, not at all young’, she is ‘sitting in the parlour ... with a baby at her breast’. ‘This baby was one of twins; and I may remark here that I hardly ever, in all my experience of the family, saw both the twins detached from Mrs Micawber at the same ...”

“... Kensington; the waiting room with its easy chairs, where the only reading matter provided was the Lady; and his consulting room, which was also his study, with its glass-fronted book cases, wall-to-wall Freud. The doctor himself was reassuring, silver-haired, puffing at his pipe, tamping the tobacco down with a metal spatula and peering over the end of his ...”

“... strange. Shaftesbury might want to extract philosophy from where ‘we have immur’d her (poor Lady!) in Colleges and Cells,’ but Philocles’ attainment of wisdom as he listens to Theocles celebrating the order of Nature could only take place in some philosophical arcadia. He is most often encountered ‘roving in the Fields’ with a copy of Virgil ...”

“... of a Levantine grocer. In op-ed fable she presented the Windsor family’s lone human face, Avon Lady to the House of Atreus. This wasn’t so long ago, and the Royals’ supposed bounce back to public favour came as a shock to many in the commentariat. They need not have been surprised. Even in December 1997, at the supposed nadir of the Windsor clan’s ...”

“... family. Always, on meeting, he wore a gentle smile that would have flattered a kind old lady, an effect curiously enhanced by his carefully trimmed moustache, less curiously by his lilting manner of speaking which seemed to sing at you – more musically, I always thought, than his singing voice – and all this at the very top of a ...”

“... evicted by its new owners. The contents of her pantry below her on the steps, she looks like a bag lady. But that was not the end of the Joséphine Baker story. She returned to the Paris stage for the 50th anniversary of La Revue nègre in 1975 and died later that year at 68 after the second performance of her acclaimed show Joséphine. It was a triumphant ...”