“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... out to be the holy fool’s daughter with the Tatar. Looking for all the world like a highborn lady, the holy fool glances towards us and smiles. On that glance we cut to a dejected Boriska. He reacts to his achievement by breaking down and crying. His father, he confesses to Rublev, passed on to him no secret. The boy was winging it. What the old man knew ...”

“... turning both to another physical pleasure (as Gurov will with his watermelon in Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’), and to masculine, practical matters. All the versions cited here begin, unsurprisingly, with ‘Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth . . .’ Wall goes on: was mending one of the two broken reins with his little ...”

“... rules for lodging a lawsuit, who persuaded the victim’s mother to change her mind. But the old lady later gave up her efforts, leaving the lawyers without a client.Beijing launched a ruthless counterattack. The central propaganda machine – CCTV, the People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, plus the news outlets ordered to use Xinhua’s feed on pain of ...”

“... had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles’), its unheard-of length (‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ filling a whole side) and its strange, secretive instrumentation achieving what Dylan would later define as ‘that thin, that wild mercury sound’. These three seminal albums were created over a period of just 14 months, and their ...”

“... poetry – which read in bulk can sound as though Shakespeare’s sonnets to the so-called ‘dark lady’ are being recited on an endless fast-forward loop with ‘White Goddess’ and ‘Muse’ substituted for the dark mistress – depends for its force on being entirely (to go back to Woolf’s perfectly apt word) ingenuous. These are meant as real ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it up with the intensity of a Thatcher, and are under much more severe pressure than the Iron Lady had to withstand. Their chief supporters are each other; unlike the lonely Balcerowicz in Poland, they have a group inside the Cabinet among whom ideas can be floated and experiences shared, as well as the co-operation of foreign governments and ...”

“... to what was right and what was wrong,’ Beatrice wrote in her diary. ‘This gifted and charming lady, with her classic features, subtle observation and sympathetic style, badly needs a living philosophy.’ Eighteen months later, when the news of Virginia’s suicide reached her, Beatrice remembered Virginia’s words to her. These, she thought, might ...”

“... you have wiped my face.’ As Philip didn’t want Mrs Isaacs to play with him, that lady was obliged to go about the whole morning with the crachat upon her. Immediately Tony appeared Philip spat at him, and in general cowed and terrified him as had never happened to him before. That may be a good thing; but it doesn’t precisely seem to be the ...”