“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”