“... 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 ...”

“... wrong. Those ‘lone middle-aged men with their barley wines’ watching the strip show at the Lady Godiva: bearing in mind that ‘middle-aged’ means the author’s age or younger, is that really what they’re drinking? Stranger drinks have survived in the marketplace, either by defiant unwholesomeness (Irn-Bru) or energetic rebranding (Lucozade). So ...”

“... leave. Shaking and white-faced, they passed through the jeering throng. ‘Prostitutes!’ an old lady shrieked. ‘Rats!’ A man tried to leave the building, helped through the mob by some elderly men dressed as Cossacks, but the protesters followed him down the road. ‘Beat him! Beat him!’ one of the old women cried, chivvying the protesters on. He was ...”

“... in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a Trotskyist’: ‘Lady, I ain’t no Trotskyist. You should read up on the position of the USA Socialist Party on war, etc, and you will find that it is exactly ye old Leninist principle that the POUM stands for: turn imperialist war into civil war.’ Who was or wasn’t ...”

“... Saracen’s Head’ of going with William and Dorothy Wordsworth to dinner with a certain literary lady in the neighbourhood of Grasmere and being served a meagre dinner while the hostess gobbled up the only pheasant; Coleridge’s old father, the vicar of Ottery St Mary, badly short-sighted, mistaking a lady’s gown for ...”

“... have secrets of his own. In a literary novel with a Connie and a Clifford there is certainly a Lady Chatterley allusion lurking, but it isn’t Connie who is the focus of attention here. The chapter is set just before the affair erupts, and the book avoids dramatising those events, but jumps forward again by a handful of years, leaving a scattered trail of ...”

“... were born into an upper-middle-class London family: her father (whose sister, Elizabeth, became Lady Longford; Antonia Fraser is Harman’s cousin) was a doctor and her mother had qualified as a barrister, though she gave up work when she had children. Their four daughters were to be educated but marriageable; not too submissive or too assertive; and to be ...”