“... 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 ...”

“... Bulawayo’s writing, is more often likened to defecation. ‘If you have any ears,’ the First Lady of Jidada warns her subjects, ‘you’ll heed my advice because what you’re doing is swallowing all manner of big rocks, and very soon it shall be seen just how wide your asshole is when those very rocks will need to be shat!’ In Bulawayo’s debut ...”

“... For the sum of just ‘four bundles’ – a bundle is $10,000 – he could arrange for one of his lady friends in Malmö to marry me. (‘We have to pay her a bundle in advance.’) There would be a wedding in Baghdad, with pictures. ‘Then once you get your visa, arranged through a contact at the Swedish embassy in a neighbouring country, you pay us another ...”

“... McCann remembers that about a week after Ranger Best was shot I argued on a street corner with a lady who had been vigorously supporting the ‘peace campaign’, in the course of which I alleged against her that, ‘I suppose if you knew who did it you would give the names to the police.’ At this she stalked away saying that she had been trying to conduct ...”

“... and don’t bend themselves up at each end as common seals do. ‘Like black bananas,’ the B&B lady had said on Berneray, the night before we sailed. A stone caught my eye, and I bent to pick it up. It was a perfect sphere of white quartz that fitted the palm of my hand, an orb. I’ll keep that, I thought, and, in the moment it had taken me to admire it ...”

“... of Churchill’s inner circle, Action This Day, which in her first edition (but not the second) Lady Soames said was written at Clementine’s express wish. The first third of Moran’s book has now been reprinted as Churchill at War, 1940-45, with some additional material from his papers and a new introduction by his son John. As his son ...”

“... Fencibles (for whom he collected and sometimes wrote such songs as ‘Nine Inch Will Please a Lady’), he laid the foundations of his own cult. So ridiculed and loathed by 20th-century Scottish intellectuals, Burns suppers are not a betrayal of the bard, but merely a damagingly partial continuation of his legacy. The prominence of Burns among icons of ...”

“... going to live with a perfect stranger while receiving letters from my former chums, inmates of the Lady Chichester Hospital, cheering my good fortune and wondering how I was getting on in my new life. I was getting on as anyone of my age might, given my previous circumstances and the fact that I had been taken on, sight unseen, for I didn’t know how long, as ...”

“... to get rid of that woman who’s doin’ a Negress. My mother ain’t a Negress. My mother’s a lady.’ But Dowling held fast and Taylor, so drunk she couldn’t stand ninety minutes before the curtain went up on opening night, managed to pull herself together, got rapturous notices for her performance, made Williams rich and presented him with the ...”

“... educate young men. And so it went on. When Parliament gave women the right to stand for election, Lady Sandhurst was unseated from the London County Council by an opponent who claimed that, not being a person, she could not be ‘a fit person of full age’. But when a Miss Cobden was elected and waited till the time for challenge was past before taking her ...”