“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”