“... novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither ...”

“... allowing him to participate in romanticism and rebellion and to fall in love with a wild Scots lady, and then bringing him safely home to a hereditary estate and marriage with an English rose. The formula is more perfunctory in Pushkin but also more effective in the detail of the text. Grinev’s efforts at achievement in the romantic style are pointedly ...”

“... affectionate portrait of a granny wrangling with a market stallholder – De yam good? Old lady, get yuh nails outta meh yam! Ah mad tuh make yuh buy it now you damage it so bad Dis yam look like de one dat did come off ah de ark She brother in de Botanical Gardens up dey by Queens Park Tourists with dey camera comin’ from all over de ...”

“... untypical, and here the accounts we have are largely those of the better-off. Lord William Nevill, Lady Constance Lytton, Jabez Balfour and the suffragettes: their views reflect the redoubled degradation felt by prisoners drawn from a better social class. In other words, his overall picture does not compensate sufficiently for the fact that, as he himself ...”

“... art of refinement, of precision. Somehow it is typical that she should write, not about the famous Lady of Shalott, but about her more obscure relation, the Gentleman of Shalott. On that Pullman to Boston, she is sick: ‘I threw up, yellow, into something I referred to ... as a “hopper”.’ That ‘yellow’ is priceless, funny, and an example of good ...”

“... at Macy’s, ‘mankind thriving in their solitudes in shoes’. Here he stumbles on a bag-lady living in ‘a niche between buildings with tin canopy/shelter from cold rain’, surrounded by pots and pans and plates, on her head a ‘motheaten rabbit-fur hat’, her teeth no more than ‘hard flat flowers arranged around her gums. Of course it is ...”

“... very senior official in the Carter White House allowed a woman the wires later described as ‘the lady from Peru’ to stick a halt-dozen spoonfuls of Bolivian cocaine up his Oval Office nostrils. It was the snort heard round America and the sound ignited a series of horrible nationwide news reports and twisted political events that led to the total ...”

“... this strain, reinforcing his disbelief in the accusations: You enquire what the fugitive Lady has in her power. She has, I think, nothing in her power but to return home and mend her behaviour. To obtain a separate maintenance she must prove either cruelty to her person or infidelity to her bed, and I suppose neither charge can be supported. Nature ...”

“... tells him, ‘I love you more and more every day,’ she can write that Kinnaird ‘told Shelley lady Byron usually called your Wife was in good health and on a visit to Mrs Leigh’. Since Claire knew quite well (he had told her) of Byron’s incestuous passion for his half-sister Augusta Leigh, that sentence is surely a nicely-judged double blow. A few ...”

“... handkerchief. I came back and forth from inspecting a very life-like statue of Mary, Our Lady, in the bedroom next door. My granny was speaking like I’d never heard her do, in a way I found quite frightening. She seemed to trust my mother as far as she was able to, in the way that women who’ve lived in a similar relation to men sometimes do. Each ...”

“... of the faces – Ruby Sparkes, Eddie Chapman, Tommy Smithson – were in attendance; along with Lady Docker and ‘William Hickey’. Literary life has made few advances from that day in 1955. Gennaro’s being the aboriginal aka of the Groucho Club.) With the passage of time images from the Kray scrapbooks, once seen as the harmlessly boastful trophies of ...”

“... of it from an incoming Tory government, was important. This time round there was only the visit of Lady Thatcher – probably worth several percentage points on the pro-Home Rule turn-out. In Wales, too, there was a dramatic shift in balance in the 1997 referendum as compared with that of 1979. Though the Welsh Assembly and its area of authority will be much ...”

“... their wrists and necks, and, on the other, Dolly’s relatives, in particular one frail, tall old lady in a white sari and pince-nez glasses, with pearls at her neck, and all these people looking at each other. Then all the talking died away, there was a curious moment of silence, it was absolute and total, even the birds stopped chirping in the trees. Then ...”

“... In 1931, he refused her permission to put Harold Nicolson on air to discuss Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but offered a prototypical BBC fudge: Nicolson would instead be allowed to tell listeners about the decision. Matheson resigned from the corporation.Her book Broadcasting, written shortly afterwards, displays the fascinated speculation ...”

“... bears a more than passing resemblance to Michael Redgrave’s character at the beginning of The Lady Vanishes, ‘putting on record for the benefit of mankind one of the last folk dances of Central Europe’.) Parry returned to Harvard in September with less material than he would have liked, but a better sense of what he would need on a second ...”