“... guises as he works his way through the passengers, from the ‘cosmopolitan’ to the kindly old lady. To one he sells non-existent shares in the Black Rapids Coal Company. He inveigles funds for the imaginary Seminole Widow and Orphan Asylum. He hits up others for something he calls ‘the World’s Charity’. From yet another he coaxes money for an ...”

“... is a nursery school, a prefabricated building with a plaque on it, to say that it was opened by Lady Astor; I have someone read it out to me. My grandfather tells me the people from the nursery hang over the back wall, saying: ‘Can’t Ilary come to our school?’ But he says, he tells me, that he wants my company, and I am too useful about the ...”

“... set a million squinty eyes on him, judging, condemning – how dare this broody brute browbeat Lady Marchmain so? The guilty verdict, a public condemnation based only on her testimony and the understandable prejudice against highfalutin authors with scowling dispositions, was an injustice that Roth would spend the rest of his life scheming to overturn. He ...”

“... the gods, not one of the mortal humans,not one of the birds …Thereafter, for nine days did the Lady Demeterwander all over the earth, holding torches ablaze in her hands.Sharon eventually got what she was looking for. One day, Caroline texted her the name of the man she had been living with at the time of Nikki’s murder: David Smith, also known as David ...”

“... says but defending his right to say it. Ahmed is clearly a fan. After Peterson’s lecture at Lady Mitchell Hall in 2021 – during which he quipped that ‘educated women’ were ‘very annoying’ – Ahmed described it as ‘a brilliant talk from which we’ve all learned so much’, and presented Peterson with a first edition of Darwin’s Descent of ...”

“... over May, quite detached from the reality of her political situation: ‘STEEL OF THE NEW IRON LADY’ (the Mail); ‘May to EU: give us a fair deal or you’ll be crushed’ (the Times). Johnson (‘BORIS’) was adored (between his resignation as foreign secretary and his becoming prime minister, he wrote a column for the Telegraph and now writes one for ...”

“... other thing which Nicodemus could not know about was the iconoclastic destruction of the Lady Chapel in Ely Cathedral, the figures of the Saints and the Evangelists and the Virgin having been smashed and broken and hurled into the waters of the Fen years before. But with the draining of the Fen, the lowering of the waters and the shrinking of the ...”

“... in the obscure realms of the detained and disappeared. Danielle Mitterrand, France’s first lady, took Daure’s evidence about abuses in Morocco seriously: she is said to have refused a state visit to Rabat until Daure was allowed to re-enter the country and marry Serfaty. The marriage went ahead, in accordance with Jewish ceremony, in the Kenitra ...”

“... truck seemed to be moving faster as Sam began losing patience with his ex-wife. ‘Listen, young lady. You’re being rude! You’re cutting me off. Listen, you fat pig. You fat fuckin pig. I’m losing power here.’ She wouldn’t accept that Sam was on a mercy mission. She thought he was bragging about what he had done, and she would rather he had gone ...”

“... as ‘Brutal Behrens’. Plus a housekeeper, gardener and five dogs (‘one for each lady and one for the housekeeper’), plus eventual evacuees in the form of a young mother and infant.This menage was a bedlam of yelling and barking and interminable discussion around Mrs M’s persistent and unreasoned attempts to sell the house from under the ...”

“... to come downstairs, and for Sam, the son of my neighbour.’ No one had woken Sheila, the elderly lady who lived on that floor, and Sam had to leave without his father, who suffered from dementia and was refusing to move. ‘Where is your dad?’ Hamid asked him.‘He is frozen. He can’t walk.’Reflecting on it later, Hamid said he understood. Sam – who ...”

“... blazer. He seemed to like that, the stripes.’ John C. Spahr was born on 9 January 1963 at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. His mother, Eileen, is the eldest of her Irish family, the Kellys, who came to Boston from Ireland before the Second World War. Eileen married Ronald Charles Spahr of Philadelphia, the son of German immigrants, and ...”

“... of piano playing on this ordinary girl: ‘disjoined from her music-stool, [she] was only a young lady with a quantity of dark hair and a very pretty, pale, undeveloped face.’ As yet she doesn’t live as she plays, but Mr Beebe is, of course, prescient. Much later in his life, Forster, speculating whimsically about the future of some of his ...”

“... various members of a large and famous Bloomsbury family, children and grandchildren of the old lady to whom the house belonged, had settled down in deckchairs under the window where I was trying to write. Some of them had been swimming in the sea, some reading, one had been writing in pencil in a large notebook, and now they had gathered, with bottles of ...”

“... woman who sent in some sonnets that were published in the magazine with the title: ‘From the Fat Lady of the Sonnets’. The pained dentist who thought he was Dante al dente complained bitterly. And not only complained, but cried and prayed (he was a Catholic convert) and called us chartered murderers who assassinated writers as if they were so many ...”