“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... participation. Homophobia is both a moral and historical category error. Score one for Marcel and Lady Gaga: we were born this way. Strategic essentialism of this kind has been a route to rapid social change, of which legislative advances (decriminalisation, age of consent, marriage) are an index. But it has also been attended by uncertainties and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”