“... lack of comprehension’. Many of the British were arrogant and culturally insensitive. When Lady Diana Cooper took off her shoes before entering the great Shwedagon pagoda in Rangoon, as you were supposed to do, she claimed she was upbraided by the governor, the terrible Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, for dealing ‘such a blow to white prestige that the ...”

“... a screening of the miscast Hitchcock version of Rope, he reactivated a shadowy earlier affair with Lady Ursula Chetwynd-Talbot, a novelist under the name ‘Laura Talbot’ who was generally known as ‘La’. Lois finally withdrew her moderately stabilising influence, divorcing him in 1953, and his marriage to La a year later was not a successful fresh ...”

“... The bridge the train is crossing has always been assumed to be the railway bridge at Maidenhead. Lady Simon said she had been in the same compartment as Turner on a Great Western train from Exeter to London, and he told her that Rain, Steam and Speed was realised after he put his head out of the window of a train as it passed over the Thames at ...”

“... nasty cake, bad weather, no wonder hardly anyone bothered to show up. Feigning a fluttering old-lady confusion, she hears each child’s unflattering version of small family mishaps, just about concealing the thrill she gets from stirring up so much ill will. Hubbard (Hubby), hastily putting up storm windows, smashed his thumb and needed stitches. Rose was ...”

“... authority guised as exotic strangers in photographs sent to loved ones back home – Aladdin, Lady Precious Stream, or the Black King at Christ’s nativity, among other Orientals. The sequence of inversions and impersonations in the scene where Mr Rochester disguises himself as a Gypsy woman and tells Jane’s fortune is dizzy-making: insider playing ...”

“... respond jealously, “Then go fuck Debbie Rowe.” All I knew of Debbie was that she was a kind lady who helped me with my ear infections.’ Another time Riley picked up the phone to hear her dad telling Lisa Marie: ‘Get my son off that guy’s fucking lap.’ Eventually, Jackson’s drug use came between them (travelling with his own anaesthetist was a ...”

“... fussy, inquisitive’ Miss Marple, whom she also identified with Kierkegaard’s ‘knight or lady of faith’. Back then, I was knight or lady of nothing. I loved Hegel, and philosophy, and studying with Gillian, but mainly I was scared.‘A pitiful approach,’ Rose writes in Paradiso of Peter Brown’s Augustine of ...”

“... about the investigation he and his colleague had undertaken. I wish I could claim that the lady who triggered off this conversation had proved to be an interviewee! None the less, the vivid memory I have of an occasion which was peculiarly Viennese in its ingredients – a heady mixture of coffee-house, prostitution and psychological probing ...”

“... easy money. I once went to a Labour Day rally there; Bill and Hillary both spoke. The future First Lady was breathless with enthusiasm. ‘When Bill first brought me here, I said to him: “Just look at all these small businesses.”’ Yes indeedy, ma’am. Ready cash preferred. Bill’s mother, Virginia Kelley, was a doyenne of the beauty-parlours, bars and ...”

“... filter of his wife, who wrote his memoirs. There is an element of sexual jealousy in her tone:The lady was a most disgusting little withered creature (although young), very white, and, what my husband disliked very much in any woman, had a powdery look upon her skin. Her voice was pitched in the highest key of childish treble, indeed so thin, and ...”

“... This seems about as wrong as could be. Clough was the rebel, Amabel, in the end, the Squire’s Lady – and good at it, as she had been at organising delegations to Spain, not untypically goading a Brondanw under-gardener into further education and ultimate headmastership. Nor should this surprise anyone. Clough’s third career (the Dandy), silence and ...”

“... best to respond:I mean what I heard first there’s all this high music right? So then this here lady starts singing up yours up yours so then this man starts singing up mine, so then there’s some words she starts singing up mine up mine so he starts singing up yours so then they go back and forth like that up mine up yours up mine up yours that’s what I ...”

“... and symmetries between European nations. They thought of Europe as one body, much like the green lady in the Strahov library. The limbs of the body were nicely proportioned, a coherence made possible by broadly similar religion, manners, customs and laws. Voltaire spoke of Europe as ‘a single republic divided into several states’, with a balance of power ...”

“... the waiter. ‘It’s a mistake.’ I reached the 1990s without mishap, though Miss Shepherd, the lady who lived for 15 years in a van in my drive, died at the end of April 1989, after which the undertaker rang up wondering if 9 May would be a suitable day for her funeral. ‘Why not?’ I said. I was only surprised that I hadn’t thought of it myself. In ...”

“... in his bushy white hair … I never came into contact with him but once, when he asked any young lady in the room to hold up her hand if she had been chased by a wild bull, and as nobody else did I held up mine (though of course I hadn’t). ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I am afraid you do not count. You are a little savage from New Zealand.’In Katherine ...”