“... porn involving consenting adults. His refrigerator has a truly amazing capacity for beer and his lady friends of all ages have very audible cigarette lighters. There are some menus, gracefully thrown together, but the Narrator seems to eat more spaghetti than anything else. He slurps it up, in fact, which fits well with the oral passions elsewhere on ...”

“... though James hoped she would live on in his portraits of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Millie Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902). The third (uncompleted) volume, The Middle Years, published in 1917, a year after James’s own death, brings his life to early maturity in 1878, when he was 35. The only single-volume edition of the ...”

“... head (‘The Gift’), then a groovy song about an operation performed without anaesthetic (‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’). There’s a fair amount of blood spilled, a lot of Grand Guignol – and a heavy dose of juvenile idiocy – in these songs. It’s worth thinking about why this has been tolerated, even admired in the case of the Velvet ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Angela Brazil, given to saying such things as ‘What a lark! What a sell!’ Converted as an old lady to the new religion, she conceives the duty of her piety to be the discovery and excavation of the True Cross. She is impatient with the theologians who are meanwhile busy inventing Christian metaphysics: ‘There’s a solid chunk of wood waiting for them ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... society hostess and philanthropist Eugenie Schwarzwald, who was, as Delany describes her, ‘Lady Ottoline Morrell, Beatrice Webb, A.S. Neill and Margot Asquith, all rolled into one’. Schwarzwald surrounded herself with a hand-picked group of youngsters who were invited to spend their holidays in her country house, which she ran like a summer camp. It ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while working as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State, dunned the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million backhander to the Contras and then lost the money in a Swiss computer error. Ronald Reagan sent three ...”

“... with anger because the man believes his lies. He rings the bell at a strange door, and asks the lady who answers if she is the person who advertised for a nurse to wheel around an old man. Of course, Tangen has invented the job. When she tells him that no such job exists, Tangen leaves in a fury. The invention has become real for him: ‘The ...”