“... of Midgley down the long corridor. ‘I’ll give you such a clatter when I get you home, young lady,’ Jean was saying. ‘He did save up.’ ‘Only a week,’ said the child. ‘When we get there,’ said Hartley, ‘we want to go in in twos. All together would be too much of a strain.’ ‘What’s he doing going to Barnard Castle?’ said Jean. ‘He ...”

“... the anti-Bradleyanism of his Cambridge days, the time of L.C. Knights’s How many children had Lady Macbeth?, as well as against the more high-falutin criticism that poured out in his later years, the product of academic market pressures or perhaps a corrupt neo-Christianity. People had stopped understanding what poets actually do; Empson would ...”

“... district auditor in January 1994 that ten councillors and officers, including the Council leader Lady Porter, should pay £21.25 million in surcharges. But of greater national significance was the effect that the poll tax had on the electoral register. It is now estimated that more than a million people failed to be counted by census enumerators in April ...”

“... in Rome, of Princess Agnes (1205-1282), the daughter of yet another King Wenceslas. (An old lady whose house lies on the steep way to St Vitus’s Cathedral put a notice in her window: ‘Pilgrims are welcome to a night’s lodging, but I have only two beds, two eiderdowns and four blankets.’) This is the first Czech uprising fully supported by the ...”

“... as those of T. Dan Smith, in which all things were made anew. Through the Lawrence revival and the Lady Chatterley trial Northernness was associated with the cause of sexual frankness, the practice of post-Victorian morality, and the desacralisation of marriage. Socially, too, Northernness came to stand for a new and emancipatory openness. The scholarship boy ...”

“... I was handed back the parcel I had sent to M. in the camp. ‘The addressee is dead,’ the young lady behind the counter informed me. It would be easy enough to establish the date on which the parcel was returned to me – it was the same day on which the newspapers published the long list of Government awards – the first ever – to Soviet writers. By ...”

“... assurance: ‘I’ll be all right if I’m not joggled,’ he may be saying to some anxious lady. There is a suggestion of the later Evelyn Waugh. Still, though the method can produce boss shots, the sturdy indifference to received opinion, the basic earnestness and the eye open to the whole scene, allow her to come out with important ...”

“... where people are reduced to types pulled hither and yon by the voice of the new Zeuses, the Foxy lady liars on cable news, the gods of Google, the li[k]es of Facebook. Channelling the anger of the lie-ee into fiction is what the so far non-existent thing, the great British technonovel of the 21st century, needs to do. Perhaps the outlines of that book have ...”

“... said he had travelled to volunteer in Poland but had contracted Covid and was ‘looking for a lady to spend time with who has or has recently had Covid’. You could tell yourself that these men weren’t seeking to exploit Ukrainian women for profit so much as looking for a wartime hook-up scene, but that wouldn’t explain why (or how) so many of them ...”

“... derivative and the most influential British pop musician after the Beatles, seems unassailable: Lady Gaga, Hot Chip and C Spencer Yeh owe as much to him now as the Sex Pistols, Kate Bush and Joy Division did in the late 1970s. Because of the way Bowie ceaselessly reinvented himself, from his first gig, playing saxophone with the Kon-Rads at the Bromley Tech ...”

“... Once her diaristic poem-texts let us in on her ‘urge to shit voltaire style’; now we get Our Lady of the Cat Litter Tray. A typical diary text of old was: ‘i rummage thru the closet. it takes a long time, but i finally find what i am looking for. a sack of red skin.’ Now, she tells us she spends her days sprawled in front of ITV3 for ...”

“... young man leaving a café in Old Compton Street and crossing the road holding a letter; an elderly lady who seemed to be talking to herself in Rupert Street. I wanted to see the street market and asked Nigel to go to Berwick Street. All the barrows were loaded with produce.‘How far in can you go?’He smiled, pulled on the joystick, and in seconds he had ...”

“... Blears. With a name that combines both blur and smear and which would have delighted Dickens the lady in question has always shown herself to be an unwavering supporter of Mr Blair, though lacking those gestures in the direction of humanity with which her master generally lards his utterances. 12 March. A cold bright day in Yorkshire and I sit briefly at the ...”

“... tone of one who knows that he is all-powerful. The defendant he addresses is the thin, middle-aged lady I saw waiting outside court earlier in the morning. She has removed her overcoat to reveal a matching tweed skirt and light blue cardigan. Her ash-blonde hair is neatly bobbed. Her coat and her wicker basket, the fronds of some decorative fern peeping from ...”

“... and the cliché-ridden terms in which it was rendered into English by such as Standish O’Grady, Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde, who became president of Ireland at the time the book was being completed. But it is too easy to make these connections between Joyce and O’Brien and too easy also to misread O’Brien’s regular assaults on Joyce as an aspect of ...”