“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... spree on the tables at Baden seems to have been prompted by reluctance to go on to meet his lady friend in Paris. This was Apollinaria Suslova, usually cast by biographers as the Dostoevskian ‘infernal woman’ premier grade, model for his diabolical heroines and source of many of his woes. In Frank’s presentation she becomes a rather ordinary ...”