“... spotlights, and the geometrically scored skate-marks disappear, he goes off and screws the leading lady the director covets. It’s a brilliantly comic moment – and one that (again) replays, or becomes a snapshot, en abîme, of the complex cultural legacy Toussaint has inherited, and its relation to a dumb mainstream culture in a corner of whose soil it must ...”

“... Stories rely on mystery. Who killed the old lady? We don’t know, so we read on to find out. Perhaps we do know, so we read on to see if the killer will be caught. It may be that we know the culprit’s identity, and know they’ll be caught, but we read on to find out how, and why they did it. Or perhaps we know all these things, but, having been introduced to a set of characters, we stay to get to know them better; and, having got to know them, we stay longer, because it is a mystery how they are going to deal with the problems we now know they have ...”

“... to habeas corpus in the case of a supposed ‘lunatic’ occurred in the 1670s, after ‘a certain lady, esteeming her husband to be mad, put him out to a doctor to be cured.’ There followed many cases of wives declared by their husbands to be lunatics and then confined. But it was of course necessary for the court to decide whether the person detained was ...”

“... Senate on various issues (as she was before her run for president). Abused in the role of first lady, she had come to be respected by the press as a lawmaker. Her low profile in the cabinet has been a surprise. But Obama’s extraordinary insistence on placing himself at centre stage has kept out all contenders. We are learning now, from such sources as Bob ...”

“... made a comment at the time. Adam, old chap, we all get carried away when there’s a lovely lady on the screen – can’t fault your taste, my boy, she’s the most delightful creature – but next time be a bit more discreet, eh? You might give your mother a turn. An unthinkable scenario. Of course he wasn’t asking me to believe anything of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I believe wherever she goes and casts an eye into the masculine world, she is the sovereign lady, the ruler.’ These sovereign qualities lasted long after her looks had faded. When Elias Canetti met her in 1933, he observed an ‘inebriated individual, who looked much older than she was’, large and overflowing, ‘with a cloying smile and ...”

“... to photograph our weary troop struggling uphill, with one of the signs in the foreground, a large lady sprung from her house to mark my card. Her discreet advertisement, the size of a monster TV screen, was not intended for public consumption. It stood on private property. How she and her partner, hovering with menace in the doorway, intended to vote was ...”

“... mouth of a gun and blowing them into sticky pieces which often floated down onto the dresses of lady spectators had been a regular feature of British retribution, from Hector Munro in Bengal in 1764 to Deputy Commissioner Cowan in the Punjab, who executed fifty prisoners by blowing them from guns after the Kuka outbreak in 1872. Sir Robert ...”

“... her captor uses to describe his actions. ‘Then I went downstairs and made love to my little lady’ – the formula generates a hideous frisson every time. On a grander scale, Lolita continues to destabilise its readers by constantly blurring the line that divides normal from abnormal, love from abuse. In The Discomfort of Evening there’s no whisper ...”

“... loyalty to her minister. But she demurred. ‘At the end of the day, I answer to the little lady at the end of the Mall.’ That reply confirmed that the United Kingdom is still essentially a monarchical structure. Not in terms of direct royal intervention, but as a polity in which power flows from the top down. The idiotic doctrine of parliamentary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that hardly features here, was a social star of the highest order, and was fabulously rich. Lady Tweedsmuir opined that ‘she never had to catch a bus or think about the price of fish.’Why should we feel sorry for Edward Grey? He had a wonderful life. He gained financial independence when he was twenty. He had complete freedom to pursue a country ...”