“... movement’; Mrs Thatcher, one of P.W. Botha’s most carefree allies, is a ‘considerate lady’ – a more fatuous description is hard to imagine. Politicians sit for their ghosted memoirs and authorised biographies, as they would for a portrait or a sculptor’s sketches. But because Mandela’s life has been almost wholly one of public service and ...”

“... parks at night only go there for immoral purposes.’ The trials of Ulysses, Ginsberg’s Howl, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, all had their comic moments, but none achieved the level of sustained surreal hilarity occasioned by the indictment of Ern Malley. Harris was dragged line by line through the entire corpus and called upon to defend his phantom prodigy ...”

“... big business around the newspaper as product. But the producer, generally an alert and imaginative lady, didn’t see the point. She responded tiredly: ‘My God, why? When you’ve gone through the usual boring litany about ownership and control, and what Rupert bought last week, what else is there to say?’ The short answer is everything – particularly ...”

“... the social comedies Hollywood was making at that time – films such as Jack Conway’s Libelled Lady, starring Loy, Harlow, Powell and Tracy. I do feel that with his favourite director Thomson loses his usual magnificent asringency. I wish he would see that Jean Renoir is only the Auguste Renoir of motion pictures and that the Degas is Buñuel. (The ...”

“... the Washington Times). Wanting to ‘let Reagan be Reagan’, Regan battled with the first lady to control the President’s schedule. But Nancy Reagan, as everyone now knows, had a trump in the Presidential protection game, a ‘friend’ who had access to the stars. The President’s wife has come in for considerable ridicule because she, like so ...”

“... a chance to make the acquaintance of the infant Rosalind, Portia the toddler and the pre-pubescent Lady Macbeth. But extensive as the ‘improvements’ and revisions and adaptations of Shakespeare have been, from Tate to Aimé Césaire and Tom Stoppard, they have not been carried out in recent years with the same pointed zeal as have the sequels to Austen. In ...”

“... pictorial images. The prosecution resorted to this Act because of their failure in the recent Lady Chatterley’s Lover case, brought under the Obscene Publications Act, which admitted the evidence of numbers of expert witnesses where the Vagrancy Act limited this. This strategem was a piece of blatant hypocrisy, in that the terms of the Vagrancy Act ...”

“... the United Kingdom. But an editorial apparatus that tells students how to address a baronet’s lady, and finds time to list the 15 items contained in a typical Victorian dressing-case, should also take the trouble not to encumber Virginia Woolf’s meditation on the ‘mothers who bore 13 children to ministers of religion at St Andrews’ and raised all 13 ...”

“... who had retired from the diplomatic service in search of something more useful to do. A Quaker lady, who managed a boarding-house on model lines, was helpful partly because, being deaf, she always sat at the front and rebuked any speaker who was not loud enough for her to hear. There were problems, four hundred miles from London, in getting speakers for ...”

“... social work, he seemed able to enjoy his practice: A busload arrived and I was called to this old lady who’d fainted. When I got there I found she was dead. The trouble with this town is there’s no mortuary. I knew it would upset them all if I said she was dead. I got them to strap her into the passenger seat next to me. Her son in the back (I told ...”

“... Asquith said irritably that the Liberal press was written ‘by boobies for boobies’. Lady Lilias Margaret Bathurst, proprietor of the Morning Post, told her editor that ‘the public are marvellously ignorant and will swallow anything.’ The outbreak of war accelerated the breakup of old relationships and patterns of press behaviour. On the one ...”

“... biography, I should imagine, where the word ‘must’ is always a giveaway (‘To the young Lady Venetia, the dashing young consul from Corsica must have seemed a wildly romantic figure’). Very Jean-Paul Sartre, very Mills and Boon. Of course, to say that swathes of L’Idiot are fiction is not to deny them the possibility of truth. Nor, on the other ...”

“... She may have been rich but she wasn’t laid back. Her mother was strict, a ‘Southern lady of the old school’, and the girls (five of them) didn’t smoke, drink, take drugs or ‘go out anywhere’ in jeans. Her father taught her how to use a gun. She trusted her parents and they trusted her. When some teachers found fault with her she refused ...”

“... has a special destiny waiting for her. The title, and epigraph, link her with that superior young lady, Alice. Stella’s favourite reading is Grimm, from which we are presumably intended to infer that she is an ugly duckling. But just how the metamorphosis will happen is left obscure. The novel ends with her returning to Skelf with the ever-pregnant ...”

“... elaborate conversational manoeuvre designed to trick Lord Raw-don, an aristocratic kinsman of the lady, into acknowledging a family connection with her. He was very pleased with his ‘great address’ and the fact that it ‘had a fine effect’ when he told her about it. A day or two later, however, he was less successful, ‘raving’ about M.C. to a Mrs ...”