“... pay when economic recovery’s at stake. They both talk contemptuously of gesture politics as if Lady Thatcher having tea with the General isn’t gesture politics too, the gesture in question being two fingers to humanity. 1 November. Lord Tebbit writes to the Times saying that homosexuals should be banned from sensitive cabinet posts lest they be in a ...”

“... the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlour.’ He domesticates the whale – much as Ahab deifies it – only to reinforce our sense of its strength. In the middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of his dignity, and kitten-like he ...”

“... Belfast, and trying to write short stories in a remote part of Ontario: ‘I thought of this old lady who used to come to our house. She was a spinster who had some Civil Service job to do with sanitation and she lived most of her life with her “dear aunt”. They’d not been “grand” but they had pretensions, and she had very genteel manners.’ The ...”

“... whoever’s available and an exercise we went through both with The Madness of George III and The Lady in the Van partly to find out how long the play is likely to be and also to get some notion of what it’s about. And it is helpful, though painful and embarrassing too as some sections are far from finished, the characters scarcely sketched in and the plot ...”

“... of Army Medical Services and of nursing organisation’). From that entry I also learn that the Lady with the Lamp was ‘a good mimic’, which is not what I recalled from Lytton Strachey, though in the entry for Strachey (1880-1932, ‘biographer and literary reviewer’) I learn that he thought the DNB ‘one of the most useful works ever ...”

“... Virgin walks And roses spiral her enamelled face Or fall to splinters on unwatered streets. Our Lady of Babylon, go by, go by, I was once the apple of your eye; Flies, flies are on the plane tree, on the streets. The vatic ferocity of it all seems numbing and alien. And yet for all that, it still depends on things being seen ...”

“... into thought: Is the Night chilly and dark? The Night is chilly, but not dark . . . when the Lady pass’d, there came A Tongue of Light, a Fit of Flame, And Christabel saw the Lady’s Eye, And nothing else saw she thereby. The poet is here using the speech of thought, and casting it into the colloquialism of a ...”

“... at which MGM in its heyday excelled.Brogan writes that Garland was ‘the studio’s top leading lady’ in the age of the MGM musical. His hefty book – many years in the making – is a rich resource for anyone who wants to gaze on hitherto unpublished photographs of the wondrous one. Almost all of them are ‘from the author’s collection’, including ...”

“... was almost as brutal as it was for Africans; racial difference was not decisive. He quotes a ‘Lady of Quality’ who sailed with bonded servants from Scotland to the West Indies. ‘It is hardly possible,’ she wrote, ‘to believe that human nature could be so depraved, as to treat fellow creatures in such a manner for so little gain.’ Up to a ...”

“... this point her health was poor and some criticised Brown’s gesture as exploitative of a sick old lady, but she greatly appreciated it, cherishing the opportunity to stand and wave outside her old home once again. She had little else to cheer her. Dementia had robbed her of much of her acuity. Her relations with her children, Mark and Carol, were ...”

“... me to John Russell, an 88-year-old ex-engineer in a residential care home. ‘I saw one old lady trying to stagger off with six bottles,’ Russell said. ‘They were carried for her by a complete stranger.’ He introduced me to Joan Bufton, whose daughter needs kidney dialysis three times a week; at the height of the floods she was pushed out of ...”

“... should be read ambiguously, especially in the light of her views on Virginia Woolf and other posh lady novelists. ‘I must confess,’ she wrote, that I am green with envy of your kind of assurance. I feel as if I could write in as much detail about my Uncle Artie, say – but what would be the significance? Nothing at all. He became a drunkard, fought with ...”

“... English girl who walks out, however harmlessly, with a coloured American soldier,’ a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, the queen mother, wrote to Violet Markham in 1942, ‘should be made to understand that she will very probably cause his death.’ Her remark manages to express in one breath solicitude for the girl and the soldier and raw prejudice ...”

“... by her first name and surname; but if she’s married to a knight or baronet then she’s ‘Hon. Lady’ followed by her surname; and if she’s married to a commoner she’s just ‘Hon. Mrs’ followed by her surname. There are pages and pages of this U and Non-U, posher-than-posh tosh. The guidance also states that ‘a title of nobility should always be ...”

“... out of politics reached an apogee with ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ (1959), in which the Lady Arrogant – as enemies sometimes called her – took one look at the famous picture of Elizabeth Eckford, the lone Black girl on her way into school being yelled at by a line of hate-filled whites, and decided that the most important thing going on in it ...”