“... account. Then, in the most surprising plot twist so far, Koizumi called on his one-time leading lady Makiko Tanaka to rebut, with documentary evidence, a charge by two weekly magazines that she had diverted to her own account the state-paid salaries of an unspecified number of secretaries who were employed by her family-owned bus firm. Considering the vast ...”

“... him. Click. ‘A Crime of Manners’. Blurb for a romantic fiction with a cast that includes a Lady Fuddlesby and a parrot called Sir Polly Grey. The hero, Giles, Duke of Winterton, decides to pay attention to an earl’s daughter who has many bountiful charms that the heroine, ‘Henrietta, lacks’. So here is my saint: a woman who, according to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the winter in Yalta, which provides the background for one of his most famous stories, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. In a Russian-Jewish bookstore owned by Isaac Sinani, a member of the Karaite sect (the Karaites refuse the rabbinical tradition), he met Maxim Gorky, whose early stories he admired, and Ivan Bunin, with whom he became quite intimate ...”

“... best that was ever dreamed,’ he chortled over a night-time’s romp with the delectable Lady Castlemaine, another of Charles’s mistresses. Only masturbating in church occasioned any qualms. ‘God forgive,’ he scribbled into his diary after a sermon spent mentally fornicating with a friend’s teenage daughter. In May 1667, 18 months after the ...”

“... pages later we learn that she hasn’t. She is Maria da Paz, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s current lady friend; he has been avoiding her and thinking of ending the relationship. This wasn’t what we expected. Not only does he have a girlfriend: he’s even cruel to her. This contradictoriness, the cruelty disguised by the meek exterior, has made him a ...”

“... own mixture of knowingness and innocence. Without it, there might have been no The Portrait of a Lady, no Moulin Rouge, no The Others, no accepting an Oscar for her maudlin act with a prosthetic nose as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. By portraying a starlet so cleverly, Kidman acted her way out of any assumption that she herself was nothing but a starlet. By ...”

“... for her to form a hunting party, or rush out and scalp me; though I know she’s a small poor lady, with a piping voice and a bird’s neck. Till someone explains why it’s wrong, I’m sticking by my joke. I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s the only joke I’ve got. I know everything about denominations: church, chapel, various chapels, Protestant ...”

“... stiff and virginal, stood two almost empty bottles of brandy and gin. Carlos finished off the lady’s gin, and her hard bed was left as turbulent and disorderly as a battlefield. Each is more literal than the other at times. Pinheiro and Stevens keep the mountain (‘montão’) of bibles, and lose the nest (‘ninho’) of the same; generally stick ...”

“... in short not one window, but a million,’ Henry James wrote in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady), which makes the characters who occupy it tenants of a sort. Tenants can be unruly, do damage to the fixtures, take over the place. You can see why a writer might want to tame them. In Cortázar’s ‘Casa Tomada’, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall ...”

“... grandmother designed the sensational beetle-wing costume in which Ellen Terry appeared as Lady Macbeth. Committed Liberals in politics, they had also produced a number of distinguished lawyers. Richard, with his combination of tweed, brogues and a job in the Foreign Office, his taste for gold-tipped cigarettes and a subscription to an anarchist ...”

“... of a hotel valet peering through keyholes into guests’ rooms, and Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake, from 1946, filmed entirely as if from the point of view of detective Philip Marlowe.) Similarly, the editing technique of shot/reverse shot – the camera shows an actor’s face, then what he is looking at, then the actor’s face again ...”

“... into the rain. The Tube was crowded at Bank, everyone keeping themselves to themselves, the Indian lady in sandals and socks, the young man with earphones and jagged hair lost in beats not his own; the lady across from me with the Aztec necklace, the man in the North Face jacket, the schoolchild looking out anxiously for her ...”

“... bought them and lots of other fabulous items, ready for what she planned to be her UK debut as Lady Lazarus, rising from the wreckage of her family: her stepfather, her mother and her grandmother had all died within a few years. She must have been both liberated and devastated. The important thing, though, was that the deaths had left her rich.Acker’s ...”