“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... due measure, just measure. Double standards were no standards at all. The scales held by Lady Justice on top of the Old Bailey express both unbiased scales and an unbiased weigher. (This Justice, atypically, is not blindfolded because she is taken to personify fairness.) God kept weights and measures in his bag, but in human society the objects ...”

“... broke down altogether when I entered the lofty gallery where the blessed goddess of beauty, Our Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. I lay prostrate at her feet for a long time, and I wept so bitterly that it would have melted a heart of stone. And indeed the goddess did look down pitifully upon me, yet at the same time so hopelessly as if she were trying ...”

“... at her departure. Chalked up on a wall in Derry is the possibly ambivalent ‘Iron Lady, rust in peace.’ This paper was born at the time, 1979, when she became prime minister, having won her election as Tory leader, a post she’d gained over the dead bodies of many of the party’s wise heads. It did not take very long to see that papers of ...”

“... Greenmantle Hannay, in his early forties, admits that he has ‘never been in a motor car with a lady before’. ‘I am glad you think I am better at love-making,’ Buchan wrote in a letter to Gilbert Murray. ‘I hate the stuff. I sit and blush with disgust when I am writing it.’ So flirtation and sexual tension were largely off the table as a means of ...”

“... half-forgotten fairy tales and the woeful background drone of the radio news. As a ‘nice lady’ at one point says, trying to put this local horror into perspective, a child goes missing somewhere in this country every three minutes – a figure which may to a rational mind sound like a total fabrication but which feels real to an unconscious ...”