“... chapters are about her posthumous meanings and her adoption by everyone from François Hollande to Lady Gaga. Looseley, who teaches contemporary French culture at the University of Leeds, is too much given to obfuscating seminar jargon – the ‘dimensions of language and location … provide an intercultural optic which is possibly unique to those working in ...”

“... an automatic pistol. The prime minister wrote gleefully that since Miss Lamont was ‘a Scottish lady in her prime and of placid temperament’, she was ‘not at all taken aback’, and merely explained the problem. The Russian thereupon closed the offending curtain and locked his door. His host observed that the episode ‘reveals one aspect of the gulf ...”

“... duties’ in breeding child after child. In fact, George came to love Charlotte dearly, and her lady in waiting, Fanny Burney, testified to how lovable she was. Unusually, the king and queen slept in the same bed until they were separated by his madness. Even then, he told Burney, ‘The queen is my physician, and no man can have a better; she is my ...”

“... Castillo Armas and a votive candle at his feet. There are also photos of Trujillo and of the lady of the house with two generations of the Bush family: the two ex-presidents and Jeb, who was governor of Florida, hugging her. There is also a photo of her with Ronald Reagan.Vargas Llosa​ launched the Spanish-language edition of Harsh Times on 3 December ...”

“... and one on death row; years spent living in motels where she would sneak in posing as a cleaning lady; bursitis and peripheral neuropathy induced by the numbing agent lidocaine. She was his protector and procurer. He funded the party, which was mostly the pair of them sitting on the couch, watching television and smoking. He was still travelling for business ...”

“... seemed heavier than it had when he unloaded it that morning. ‘Maybe there is a beautiful young lady in the box,’ an airport official joked. There was, of course, a person in the box. It was Carlos Ghosn, the former chairman of the world’s largest car manufacturer, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi. But nobody knew he’d gone missing yet, and the box, with ...”

“... the matter. My status was never questioned. All the wives surrendered to my charm. I was a great lady, you know?Rami remains confused. ‘But then, how does the relationship work?’ ‘What relationship, my dear? What are you talking about?’ Chiziane’s prose​ alternates between a dramatic, high-octave style – often when Rami is suffering – and a ...”

“... to indulge but also to inhabit these memories. Anna Klumpke, aged 32 (Bonheur was 67), was a model lady companion: an attentive art student, musically gifted and willing to record injunctions and reminiscences. She was even willing to physically assume the place left vacant by Micas, moving into her yellow bedroom and accepting her watch, rings and tokens of ...”

“... keep this bone here for me because I need it to make a sancocho”’ – a Colombian stew. ‘The lady opened it and looked, and the first thing she saw was the head of her son in there.’ Did it help this woman to tell this story, to have it all written down? Pace Castillejo-Cuéllar, reconciliation is a clear goal of the commission. The testimony should ...”

“... Lawley pause as she lets the listeners absorb this. Later she says: ‘To listen to you speak, Lady Mosley, it’s almost … as if you’re rewriting history.’‘No, no, that’s just how it was. I can remember it so well.’There was a huge furore. The controller of Radio 4, Michael Green, was robust in defence. ‘In the last few years the brief of ...”

“... Tahia is referred to as almeh in her best film, one of her earliest, Li’bet il Sit (‘The Lady’s Ploy’, 1946), which also stars the greatest of 20th-century Arab actors and comedians, Naguib el-Rihani, a formidable combination of Chaplin and Molière. In the film, Tahia is a gifted young dancer and wit, used by her rascally parents to ensnare men ...”

“... suggested by Robert Giroux, Berryman’s publisher and old friend from Columbia days. The Blonde Lady of the sonnets was given the pseudonym ‘Lise’. As editor of the Collected Poems, 1937-1971, Charles Thornbury has decided to follow the final 1947 version, thus restoring Lise’s real name and the sequence’s original title, ‘Sonnets to Chris’. (He ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... time couched their relationship in sexual terms. He went to London to melt the heart of the Iron Lady. He presented her with a Georgian silver teapot. He invited her to Ireland, arguing that politicians did not go down in history for tinkering with rates of inflation, but for solving the great, intractable problems. Thatcher came to Ireland, accompanied by ...”

“... 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 ...”