“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... memorial volumes, regimental histories, military-souvenir websites – it is peculiar how many lady archivists you encounter. Some of these, it’s true, are part of husband and wife teams: the prolific Valmai Holt, for example, author, with her husband, of My Boy Jack? The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (1998). (John Kipling died in his first half-hour ...”

“... some years later, when I was about nine or ten. We had gone to a tea-shop on boat-race day where a lady had kindly asked whether I was Oxford or Cambridge. I had answered: ‘I’m a Jew.’A good deal of indoctrination must have gone into that. Did it come from reiteration by family that I was one of the chosen people? Did it come from explanation by nannies ...”

“... this section] … She was actually coming out from a crowd rush after nearly fainting!’ writes a lady from West London. ‘In your typically misogynistic attempt at smearing these protesters,’ says a young man from Kuala Lumpur, ‘I have to hand it to you. This must be one of the coolest collections of photos I’ve seen from the day.’ Not so long ...”

“... The practice is summarised in the mocking footnote we attach to Bradley: ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’ A similar topic, once much debated though now rarely reverted to, is: ‘How old, exactly, is Hamlet?’ The dimensions of the problem are these. The Prince is introduced to us as an undergraduate. But in the last phase of the tragedy, when ...”

“... church groups, educators, army officers, priests, economists and, in one case, ‘a Maryland lady sojourning in New Haven’.In the July 1864 issue of The Ladies’ Repository, a writer going by the name ‘Philologus’ recommends ve/vis/vim for its ability to secure ‘precision, perspicuity and brevity’ in communication, as was only appropriate for ...”

“... was the equivalent of John Major’s convenient toothache at the time of the shafting of Lady Thatcher. A leak here, a hint there, a little gentle self-outing and Mandy was out of the limelight, picking up the sympathy vote, at the very moment when the monster he had unleashed, and gloried in, was about to come spectacularly off the rails. When the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”