“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... against the sheer indecency of the frankness itself. The anxiety is analogous to that which made Lady Mary Wortley Montagu complain about the confessional exhaustiveness of Richardson’s heroines, saying, ‘Fig leaves are as necessary for our Minds as our Bodies,’ where, contrary to expectation, the fig leaves do not signify mainly that Clarissa’s ...”

“... And to describe ‘Odette’ as a ‘Christian name’ when it is Jewish Swann uttering it, or Lady Rufus Israels as addressing Swann’s daughter, Gilberte, ‘by her Christian name’, not only has nothing to do with Proust’s French but also implies that the Church of England has had a hand in the translation. It is to be hoped that a more informal and ...”

“... in their bunks would, it seems, pull nails out even of the hull to give as presents to their lady friends at the same time that the island lads in canoes were pulling nails out for themselves. Or, to turn the question on its head: why, when Cook was increasingly violent in dealing with annoyances, treating offending Hawaiians with cruelty and shooting at ...”

“... parallels with his British colleague. Tall, with piercing blue eyes, Sorge seemed cut out to be a lady-killer, his part-Russian looks making him a kind of Yul Brynner with dark wavy hair (Brynner was born in Vladivostok). Philby, more the tweedy Trevor Howard type, was also reckoned a handsome man. Their appeal to women, however, depended on more than ...”

“... as a Virgilian pretender, with his ‘Helmet ... nine times too large for the Head ... like the Lady in a Lobster, or like a Mouse under a Canopy of State’: His trumpeting of Oldham’s greatness – For sure our Souls were near ally’d; and thine Cast in the same Poetick mould with mine – is self-promoting and quickly turns pontifical, as Dryden ...”