“... down some peculiar byways (the Spectator comments pages). The Better Together ‘Patronising Lady’ advert kept us entertained for ages. (Watch the ‘Valium Mix’. Or the one with subtitles. I love that ‘Eat your cereal’ immediately dropped into the language.) The most surreal moment, surely, was the arrival in Glasgow of sixty Labour MPs, trucked ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”