“... Tory suggested he didn’t think about problems but sniffed at them ‘like an elderly spaniel’. Lady Baldwin wrote more accurately that her husband ‘was always an idealist; they tell me also he was quite a cunning politician.’ He was a committed Christian and a paternalistic employer; uncomfortable with the family business’s excess wartime profits, he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”