“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... does. Even so, Woolworth’s would hardly have been her cup of tea. The other long-standing lady in Larkin’s life (and who stood for a good deal), Monica Jones, remarks that to the Larkins the least expenditure of effort was ‘something heroic’: ‘Mrs Larkin’s home was one in which if you’d cooked lunch you had to lie down afterwards to ...”

“... political violence as a playwright. The play in question was Cathleen Ni Houlihan, written with Lady Gregory and first performed in Dublin in April 1902, with Maud Gonne playing Cathleen. In an interview with the United Irishman, Yeats said that the subject was ‘Ireland and its struggle for independence’. The theatre was packed every night. The message ...”

“... out in primetime. The other story in the same episode involves the titular hero robbing an old lady in the street, shouting ‘Shut up, you old bag!’ as she tries to stop him running off with her loaf. The live studio audience laughed.The new TV/old TV boundary looks even less clear-cut if you take countries other than the US into account. How do you fit ...”

“... only sister. She had studied art in Paris with Estella Solomons and Beatrice Elvery, later Lady Glenavy, both artists who regularly showed in the Dublin galleries. Cissie married Boss Sinclair, a Dublin antiques dealer and friend of the painter William Orpen; in the early 1920s the Sinclairs moved to Germany, where they dealt in contemporary German ...”