“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”