“... as a supporter of Helen Gahagan Douglas – slandered by her opponent, Nixon, as the ‘Pink Lady’ – but ended it as a patron of Nixon. Looking back, he would give this transition a more compelling gloss and allude darkly to the period when he had to carry a gun in Hollywood. Some of the resentment of Communist influence was sincere. A number of ...”

“... her, and find through loyalty and labour the independence they are now able to imagine the dead lady wanted for them. I don’t know whether this extravagance is truer than the other. It has a highly stylised shape to it, and in Proust’s case the phrasing is a little contorted. But it is kinder than the other tale, and it offers a peace quite different ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a Protestant). Her English godparents, guests no doubt at Carlo’s, were Sir Brook Bridges and Lady Lucy Boyle, the first strands in the web of useful connections which made much of her later career possible. It also established the uneasy duality that characterised her life; neither Italian nor entirely English, she was compromised at different times by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... spirituality than seemed quite fitting. She was, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, a ‘lady not known for the clarity of her views’. It didn’t matter. By now, reading Simone Weil, rereading the formerly despised Plato, reconsidering Christianity, and moving in the direction of an interest in Buddhism, she began to form a new intellectual centre ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”