“... one that is important. I wonder what fun an editor would have today with, say, Jude the Obscure or Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Point Counter Point? – or almost any novel you care to mention. One person’s thumbs-up is another’s anathema. Whether or not the publisher wants to accept a manuscript is not a question of judgment – as far as the writer is ...”

“... to Hatfield, Houghton, Hardwick or Holkham. His intimate friends were déclassé aristocrats: Lady Diana Duff Cooper, Nancy Mitford, Ann Fleming, spirited women who had broken out of the suffocating embrace of eligible matches and estates. His clothes were sometimes a comical caricature of what a country gentleman and former officer of the Blues would ...”

“... forward from Sundays and feast days, when my mother took me to Mass and we implored the pretty lady in the blue headscarf to pray for us sinners, but I don’t think like that any more. Now, I think that, if anything distinguishes us from the other animals, for better or worse, it is sin. Sin binds us to others, it makes us companionable, and the only ...”

“... many grandchildren underfoot; eventually they’re banished from the room. What do you ask ‘the Lady Macbeth of the Rwandan genocide’, as Philip Gourevitch called her? How do you approach a conversation with someone who’s been portrayed as the latter-day incarnation of a legendary sorceress in Rwandan dynastic history? Or as the ultimate ‘Hutu ...”

“... needed money partly because he was keen to find a wife, ‘a nice tight armful of a spirited young lady’ as he put it, ominously enough; and in 1837 he married Linnell’s daughter Hannah, also an artist. The couple set off for a long visit to Italy, burdened by a commission from Linnell to copy frescoes by Michelangelo and Raphael. ‘Italy – especially ...”

“... about the widow from Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an old lady in London: ‘Almost every circumstantial detail was the same.’ A miasma of doubt hung over the tale for another forty years until smart detective work by Simon Burgess for a Radio 4 documentary revealed that the widow did exist and that one of her friends ...”

“... private island of Brecqhou (as did Tony Blair and David Cameron), and on their 197-foot yacht, the Lady Beatrice. Not long after her death, a bronze bust of Thatcher was installed in the Ritz’s lobby.By then the brothers had been in the hotel business for half a century. Born within ten minutes of each other in 1934, they grew up in a family of ten in a ...”

“... at MIT who in 1966 created ELIZA, a chatbot named after Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady. Weizenbaum believed that the bot, like Eliza herself, could be taught to speak ‘increasingly well’: the program was a parody of a Rogerian psychotherapist, a practitioner who never passes judgment or offers solutions, and who lets clients lead the ...”

“... down the staircase or, having begun to do so, would retreat thinking, “There’s that eccentric Lady Levey crawling across the hall.”’ In 1983, Brophy was told she had multiple sclerosis, ‘or, rather, that the results of all the tests thoroughly conformed with my having it – a presumably legalistic formula that reminded me of my sending ...”

“... wheeling and dealing of casting actors’ who dropped in and out, including Winona Ryder as Lady Anne and Kevin Spacey as the Duke of Buckingham. Michael Mann loaned him some of the Heat crew. Pacino’s highlights reel would show him playing numerous characters who felt a terrifying disconnect – from Tony Montana to Bobby in The Panic in Needle Park ...”

“... of the studio system. Talking about his second film, Le Petit Soldat, he invoked Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai, which David Thomson has seen as ‘deconstructing’ film noir. Une femme est une femme reminded him of Lubitsch’s supposed ‘failure’, Design For Living, and Richard Quine’s decidedly minor My Sister Eileen. Godard treated Hollywood as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... woman in film noir magnetises female viewers as well as male. Gay audiences of No Way to Treat a Lady (1968) could be under no illusions that Rod Steiger’s campy vaudeville turn was any sort of sympathetic portrayal of a homosexual, but they took to their hearts the taunting catchphrase he used: ‘Doesn’t make me a bad person.’ So, too, with the ...”

“... of Teddy and niece of Sir James. I was Peter’s best man. Bianca Jagger was Dido’s best lady’); the Thatcherite on-yer-bike business memoirs (lists of flights, airport hotel massages, exotic sunsets, cockerels’ balls for dinner); jollies out East with the dictator-friendly Lord Moynihan (Philippine brothels staffed by nuns and midgets); tennis ...”

“... 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 ...”