“... 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 ...”

“... is afterwards invested in smooth inheritance and cultivation of public goodwill, ‘but – as Lady Macbeth’s hands remind us – the founding act can never be completely expunged.’ Still, he continues imperturbably, ‘the legitimacy of power is not necessarily adversely affected by the fact that the public appears only afterwards – so long as it ...”

“... it was with the aid of a walker. But she came across more as a wounded soldier than a stricken old lady. When I went over the recording of our interview I noticed how full and precise her stories of her life were before her complex of conditions and how, as the narrative shifted to the last couple of years, it was her daughter who took over the role of ...”