“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... said of Charlotte Smith, whose marriage was in its way no less catastrophic, ‘the life of this lady was a very chequered one.’ In retrospect, the odd defeat of God’s purpose in the early poem about Corsica can be seen to inaugurate a protracted interest in things just not working out as planned or as you might have otherwise expected. ‘Miss ...”

“... cameraman who’d followed my public career. Since apparently I could do no wrong with this young lady … Losing your virginity to a woman who has already constructed a shrine in your honour: what could be more transcendentally egotistical than that? Schmitt says that one of the characteristics of political romantics is that they lack a gift for real ...”

“... failure, had something to do with it as well. No book, no devastating book review. He married Lady Alexandra Haig, daughter of the field-marshal. Tall and commanding, a real-life ‘Mrs Exeter’, she was miserably married to an admiral when she and Trevor-Roper fell in love. Their letters survive, and are very touching. It was a strange match – a ...”

“... Some mildly louche shuddering occurs in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’: Beneath the lamp the lady bowed, And slowly rolled her eyes around; Then drawing in her breath aloud Like one that shuddered, she unbound The cincture from beneath her breast: Her silken robe, and inner vest, Dropt to her feet, and full in view, Behold! her bosom and half her side ...”

“... minutes did the driver get out of his seat to help me up – my opinion is changing. I am the old lady falling down and lacking the muscle power to get up. One of the most humiliating conclusions you can come to about yourself: it won’t get better (although the ‘fatness’ is water retention). But now, providing I don’t look at myself in the mirror in ...”