“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”