“... 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 ...”

“... Instead, their united front held firm in the battle of the books – in which, however, the Lady had the last word, publishing her own second volume, The Path to Power, in 1995. Mutual recriminations, disclosing unsuspectedly fierce animosities and raking over petty personal quarrels, are always distasteful – except to historians, who have always ...”

“... brown as a hazel nut, trim and remarkably upright of gait, almost as if he were an Indian village lady walking to the well with a water pitcher. He wore a dark, dowdy anorak in the Hebridean rain, a garment that was attractive in its spare austerity. His whole life was a tribute to the spirit of austerity. It was to be a week before he disclosed his spiritual ...”

“... view.’ He then went on to expound his own theory. Virgil had for ancestress a Jewish lady. Kidnapped by pirates, she ended up in Italy, having married on the way in Thrace the priest of Apollo called Maron. Furthermore, her descendant himself became ‘acquainted with the Hebrew Prophets’ and we may even contemplate him ‘reverently poring ...”

“... the News’, the widow has not been on speaking terms with Frau Doktor Schwarz, her land-lady, for a week.) If this is the comic germ of the story, the tragic germ occurred only a few months later, in March l922, when Nabokov’s father was assassinated, as he defended a political rival. The assassins didn’t even know who Nabokov’s father ...”

“... were at the desks in foyer and restaurant. But at breakfast next morning the familiar yellow-faced lady was there. Her eyes flickered hither and thither, sending silent signals to the staff. Her mouth was clamped in an enigmatic sardonic smile. Memsahib still owned the place, but her dominance had dwindled to management. Does that image mean that the nightmare ...”

“... a golden age when Baroness Thatcher was in charge … 1979, that hallowed year in which the great lady … came to office … the great, almost divine Margaret Thatcher’ – is of a piece with his reverence for the monarchy. He believes the queen gives away too much of her wealth to the nation, and would be within her rights to reject her Civil List ...”

“... masculinity’, for example, and leering female figures that irked summer visitors who knew what a lady should look like, with or without her clothes. The piece that really ‘started people coming to see my work’, he wrote in his memoir Southern English (1942), was a crucifix featuring a baby nailed to a cross (‘small children can suffer the torment of ...”

“... tone enhances and complicates meaning: ‘Suppose Henry Horne says something offensive to a young lady named Rita when her brother Charles is by to protect her. Can you hear the two different tones in which she says their respective names, “Henry Horne! Charles!” I can hear it better than I can say it.’ On other occasions, Frost makes his point by ...”

“... or money you’re in a difficult position. It’s easier to refuse money. There was an elderly lady who repeatedly came here and brought me chocolates.’ Had he taken the gifts? Had he taken money? ‘Gifts, without a doubt. I won’t answer the second part of the question.’ Even allowing for the low season, the coast has a desolate air. A few heads in ...”