“... AND GOVERNESSES, PARLOURMAIDS AND HOUSE-PARLOURMAIDS, HOUSEMAIDS, MANSERVANTS, GARDENERS, LADY GARDENERS, HOUSEKEEPERS, LADIES’ MAIDS AND MAIDS, BETWEENMAIDS AND GENERALS, MARRIED COUPLES AND MANSERVANTS, CHAUFFEURS, CHAUFFEUSES.11 May 1938: ‘Young, well-educated Viennese Nursery Governess, pleasant appearance, desires post: mother tongue ...”

“... the flight; reassured, protected, in the presence of a monument.At the airport, I text my Lady’s Companion, my friend Hope. ‘Were you joking when you invited me to come with you to Rome?’ she wrote to me tentatively last week. ‘Hoe, I would never joke about needing another lady to help me stay alive.’ She ...”

“... surprised by impromptu shows of sympathy. Delivering a letter by hand, she was met by a cleaning lady who told her that ‘the Russians’ would avenge her. Walking along near home, thinking about her shoes, she was stopped by a stranger who announced in a loud voice: ‘A French Catholic shakes you by the hand … and next, revenge!’ Within a year she ...”

“... moves seem straight from the narratology textbooks: the Stephen Hero office clock epiphany, the Lady with Lapdog but-we’re-only-just-beginning ending. A stalled playwright, recently shafted by a Hollywood agent, drops in despair into a Times Square peepshow; he weeps, hopelessly, for his ex-girlfriend, for God, for life; he drops in his money and the ...”

“... of Ambiguity, and was wondering what to write next. Urged by Jean Genet, she went to see the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, on show for the first time after the war. Citizen Kane was also being shown in Paris for the first time, and Beauvoir was impressed: Orson Welles had revolutionised cinema. Politics was not an all-encompassing consideration, for ...”

“... 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 ...”