“... I emptied all the materials from the car, I could fit in three people. MDM would have the pregnant lady, but it seemed unlikely that the other two cars would drive back into a bombardment to collect us. I said, more reassuringly than I felt, that it would be better if we all stayed inside for the moment, and that I did have some food and blankets. A ...”

“... dependent I am on you. Cimmie: Went to lunch at Maryland today, found Princess Louise, Lady Londesburgh, Jack Wilson ... I tried desperately hard to be friendly and gay. It was the fashion in the Mosleys’ circle for husbands to try to get off with other people’s wives: this was another of the ‘rules of the game’ to which Nicholas ...”

“... By 1792, the year of the monarchy’s fall, Jacques-Armand was a grown man; he had become, said a lady who had witnessed his kidnapping, a convinced republican and ‘the most bloodthirsty terrorist in Versailles’. In 1793 Louis XVI was tried and executed. Spectators ran up to the scaffold and dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood: was this reverence, or ...”

“... hesitate to contact major figures in the literary world: Ibsen, George Russell, W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory among others. But even as he made these contacts the young man courted rejection; a long letter to Ibsen on his 73rd birthday closes with the idea that the great playwright had ‘only opened the way’ and that ‘higher and holier enlightenment ...”

“... people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.’ ‘Goodnight,’ I said to the lady of the cups, and she smiled and nodded at the buzz outside. ‘You never know,’ she ...”

“... by the presence of a number of comic characters, Western denizens of Tangier, most notably a rich lady called Daisy, who has a grand house and many servants, and a large lesbian called ‘Uncle’ Eunice Goode, who stays in bed in her hotel a great deal when she is not in hot and determined pursuit of Hadija. When one of the locals, who has his own designs on ...”

“... old friends from America, Paris and England, rather than making a life in the town. She was the lady of the manor, keeping her eye on the convalescent homes at Groslay, giving a donation to the curé of St-Brice and paying out sums to local schools and charities. Though Lee alerts us to these hypothetical conjunctions, there is something dispiriting about ...”

“... education. So she started writing about the law instead, in pieces about the Stephen Ward and Lady Chatterley trials for Esquire, Jack Ruby for Life, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial for the Saturday Evening Post. ‘The law, the workings of the law, the daily application of the law to people and situations, is an essential element in a country’s ...”

“... like some imbibed jelly, a primitive life-form that will bud inside you. You throw tantrums in fat-lady shops, where the stock is grimy tat tacked together from cheap man-made fabric, a choice of electric blue or cerise. You can’t get your legs into boots, or your feet into last year’s shoes. You say, okay, then I’ll be fat. As it seems you have no ...”

“... too many questions’. A quiet exit was finally arranged. I was once told by a very old lady what the source of the problem was. ‘We used to be taken to the Halletts’ when we were children,’ she said. ‘My sisters and I would be put in the nursery to play with Hugh, and he would line us all up at one end of the room and lecture, us. I could ...”

“... physical attributes and everything to do with abstract ideals. The Leader in fact is like the Lady in courtly love poetry – cold, distanced, inhuman. Both the Leninist and the Stalinist Leader are thoroughly alienated, but in opposite ways: the Leninist Leader displays radical self-instrumentalisation on behalf of the Revolution, while in the case of ...”

“... the darkness; following this unreliable yellow thread (because she could no longer see the old lady), Huma received a sudden sharp blow to the shins and cried out involuntarily, after which she instantly bit her lip, angry at having revealed her mounting terror to whatever waited there shrouded in black. She had, in fact, collided with a low table on which ...”

“... of voice or manner when people are carried away. In his time he had heard more than one fine lady lose her temper and always to his disillusionment. Yet now, he stood his ground, and, listening, fell into a positive enchantment. Sita could let herself go as much as she pleased, she could storm and rage, but no harm would ensue. Nor did the unfortunate ...”

“... seen carefully studying the catalogue, pauses by the desk. ‘Could you tell me,’ he asks of the lady on duty, ‘how the first Lord Faringdon made his money?’ She gives him a vinegary look as if the question were in very bad taste: ‘I’ve no idea.’ 11 September. Nick Leeson, the errant young man from the Singapore Stock Exchange, is interviewed in ...”

“... Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the embodiment of Mother Ireland, is a play written in 1902 by Yeats and Lady Gregory in which she turns up, a mysterious old woman, in a County Mayo village at an opportune moment during the United Irishmen rising of 1798. The sole business of her visit is to exercise her eerie powers of thought control and inspire a fresh young man ...”