“... 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 ...”

“... many grandchildren underfoot; eventually they’re banished from the room. What do you ask ‘the Lady Macbeth of the Rwandan genocide’, as Philip Gourevitch called her? How do you approach a conversation with someone who’s been portrayed as the latter-day incarnation of a legendary sorceress in Rwandan dynastic history? Or as the ultimate ‘Hutu ...”

“... needed money partly because he was keen to find a wife, ‘a nice tight armful of a spirited young lady’ as he put it, ominously enough; and in 1837 he married Linnell’s daughter Hannah, also an artist. The couple set off for a long visit to Italy, burdened by a commission from Linnell to copy frescoes by Michelangelo and Raphael. ‘Italy – especially ...”

“... about the widow from Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an old lady in London: ‘Almost every circumstantial detail was the same.’ A miasma of doubt hung over the tale for another forty years until smart detective work by Simon Burgess for a Radio 4 documentary revealed that the widow did exist and that one of her friends ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”