“... 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 ...”

“... lives run alongside melodramatic fiction. Mary Braddon, for example, best-selling author of Lady Audley’s Secret and a bohemian variant on Jane Eyre, went to live with the publisher John Maxwell, who had ‘five children, and a wife in an Irish lunatic asylum’; after 13 years the wife died and she could at last marry him. It is little wonder that ...”

“... it. It was untraditional, new-fangled and (worst of all) above Gail’s mother’s station. Lady Kenyon (the Kenyons were the other local grandees, a lot richer and more dashing than the Hanmers) might be divorced, and that was fittingly aristocratic; for the local garageowner’s daughter to do it was very different. Who did she think she was? People ...”

“... is a crime in itself. Few expert witnesses experience the luxury enjoyed by Richard Hoggart in the Lady Chatterley trial of being able to defend a considered critical evaluation against a hail of middle-class morality. But it is too late to protest: scientists are now regular foot-soldiers in the army of the law, and the conscripts among them are becoming ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sexual life other than that he married. And his wife Rose is as elusive a personage as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Super is reduced to dredging up passages from Doctor Thorne and The Eustace Diamonds to evoke what Miss Heseltine might have been like in her lover’s eyes. In these circumstances, An Autobiography is, or should be, a godsend. It contains a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... liked were Jebb the public orator and Mrs Jebb,’ he wrote later: ‘but Mrs Jebb is an American lady and so is naturally unlike Cambridge and indeed thoroughly charming.’ In the first version of his book, published in 1951, Lord Annan obviously thought it sensible of Stephen to get out: ‘most young dons who tear themselves away from the numbing embrace ...”

“... her widespread popularity as well as much-needed cash. When the sketches had first appeared in the Lady’s Magazine of 1819, sales of the periodical had multiplied eightfold, and five volumes in the series had been published in the intervening years. The bulk of Mitford’s earnings as a writer were rapidly squandered by her dreadful father – that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his first wife. It would have been good to read about Godwin’s first meeting with that lady if the account had not been misprinted thus: ‘When he lauded Horne Tooke, Dr Johnson and Voltaire, she declared prescription, prejudice, and the British Constitution. Like that such lavish praise disagreed on religion: Godwin was a sceptical ...”

“... 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 ...”