“... uses his annual holiday to take to the roads of Surrey and Sussex, where he encounters a young lady whose head has been turned by romances featuring New Women, in rational costume, peddling towards independence by way of the revamped coaching inns of Haslemere, Midhurst and Bognor. Hoopdriver, the amateur excursionist, is encouraged, before he sets off, by ...”

“... beer at the Gato Félix and ends up inviting me to her place to meet her mother, a nice, plump lady with dyed red hair who speaks laughingly of her two ‘women-daughters’ as Viky smokes a joint next to her and her chihuahua; her brother Rúben works in a maquila and her husband, José, a serious, handsome man, works in an office. The family is from ...”

“... his closing address for the prosecution at Ward’s trial (a role he had also performed at the ‘Lady Chatterley’ trial three years earlier), told the jurors that ‘the evil goes very deep.’ Ward, they were repeatedly reminded, was a man who kept a two-way mirror in his flat, to facilitate his voyeuristic impulses. This was not true: the mirror belonged ...”

“... on choreographing a pairs routine to ‘My Humps’, the anatomically puzzling hit song about ‘lady humps’ by the Black Eyed Peas, his partner complains that he has no idea what the song means. ‘No one knows what it means,’ Ferrell replies. ‘But it’s provocative.’ Is something like this the secret motto enfolding the art of neoliberalism ...”

“... a handful of people living on a scrap of reservation in the Connecticut woods. But one old Pequod lady proves capable of invoking time – documented continuity in a homeland since the 17th century – to support the fabulously successful series of land restitution claims which created the large, wealthy and autonomous space at Mashantucket, where the Pequod ...”

“... his view of collectivisation was deemed unsatisfactory and the film burned. Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was violently denounced, and when Meyerhold spoke out in its defence he lost his theatre. Three years later he was arrested, tortured to obtain a ‘confession’, and shot. Mandelstam, a close friend of Akhmatova, was ...”

“... beneath the ‘three-piled velvet’ of human flesh, or the rich attire that bedecks the ‘bony lady’ of Vindice’s murderous puppet-play. This preoccupation with deceptive surfaces and theatrical pretence is in turn closely related to one of the most distinctive features of Middleton’s style: his fondness for simile and relative indifference to ...”

“... the latent eroticism of its homosocial intensities, philia is at last undone by eros in the Dark Lady sequence, in which the poet is degraded by the ‘perverse, self-imposed … slavery’ of heterosexual lust: ‘But my five wits, nor my five senses can/Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,/Who leaves unsway’d the likeness of a man,/Thy proud ...”

“... mass of confidences from morbid spinsters’ (though he had reason to be grateful when one lady admirer made him a gift of £40,000, guaranteeing his financial security for life). Fred, meanwhile, ‘did not feel that I had been selling my soul for lucre and a facile popularity, but rather that I had pawned it’. The collective fault was ...”

“... very idea that she could have contained her thoughts to 140 characters is preposterous. The Lady was not for tweeting. But I should have been.’ Really? Not only is the thought of Brown tweeting his way to the nation’s hearts during the banking crisis pretty absurd, it’s also a piece of historical revisionism. Twitter only really got going in ...”

“... Clinton had taken a close interest in Chinese affairs as far back as the 1990s, when she was first lady. In 2011, as secretary of state, she initiated the pivot to Asia of the navy’s carrier groups, the most conspicuous weapons in the US strategic arsenal. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an obscure trade pact in which America had until then shown little ...”

“... an average American sitting in front of me on the bus stood to give his seat to an older Negro lady.’ After attending a concert by a Black nightclub pianist called Maurice Rocco, he registers his ‘impression that only Negroes give life, passion and nostalgia to this country that they colonise in their own way’.Colonise in their own way. The phrase ...”

“... life, Synge found a kindred spirit, another Irish Protestant, who had come for the same reason: Lady Gregory. ‘I was staying there, gathering folklore, and talking to the people,’ she wrote, ‘and felt a real pang of indignation when I passed another outsider walking here and there, talking also to the people. I was jealous of not being alone on the ...”

“... and contained,’ Streisand remembers. ‘Wasn’t a director supposed to talk to his leading lady?’ The main bone of contention – from this point until the end of Streisand’s acting career – was her feeling that true performance was improvisation. She couldn’t stand it when anyone suggested that she move to the same spot on the stage or make ...”

“... about M’Coy, who has irritated him by friendly gossip just when he wanted to see the ankles of a lady stepping into a carriage (75): You and me, don’t you know? In the same boat. Softsoaping. Give you the needle that would. Can’t he hear the difference? Think he’s that way inclined a bit. Against my grain somehow. ‘That way’ without telling the ...”