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“... himself to beggary. Nearly at death’s door, he was carried into the kitchen of a charitable lady who took pity on the unfortunate. Ay-ya! The lady was none other than his wife! Ashamed, Zhang tried to hide in the fireplace, and was burned to ashes. But when he reached the other world, the Jade Emperor rewarded ...”

“... of marriage’ and exerting a ‘powerful influence for evil’. It is also improbable that a lady veteran of show-business today would find herself so surprised by pregnancy or that she would accept the condition with such passive resignation. Then again in 1948 Italy seemed like the moon – a place not easily reached from LA. Ingrid Bergman did ...”

“... this time our life was hanging by a thread’; ‘I felt drawn as if by a magnet to the young lady at my side.’ But the narrative is pretty continuously absorbing for what it tells us about everyday life in Hitler’s Germany and, in particular, about the predicament, the reactions and the motivation of the doomed Jewish community. The value of the book ...”

“... to transfer some money to Canada. It’s about $100. Nothing big.’ ‘Sure. Please talk to the lady behind that desk. She’ll help you.’ ‘Good morning. The lady over there told me you could help me with a wire transfer to Canada. It’s just about $100.’ The woman looks amused. ‘First of all, if you want us ...”

“... with vignettes that run from The French Lieutenant’s Woman to The Devil Wore Prada to The Iron Lady. ‘You have to work doubly hard to make contemporary clothes disappear,’ another designer says, while Marit Allen, who worked on Brokeback Mountain, underlines the ‘subliminal telegraphy’ that clothes give out, adding the mysterious information that ...”

“... a match as if trying to set it on fire. In Charon’s boat I intend to give my seat to the first lady that comes along. Short poem: be brief and tell us everything. An old man huddled over a urinal with a doomsday sign on his back. The waiter’s name was Bartleby – or it should have been. He brought me two pieces of burnt toast on a cracked plate. I ...”

“... impasses – on ‘not getting it’ – in which she reproduces her college notes on ‘The Day Lady Died’, Frank O’Hara’s I-do-this-I-do-that poem. She laid bare the earnestness of the A-student – in primly rounded handwriting – with her crypto New Critical fatuities, noting, for example, the ‘lack of emotion in urban surroundings’. ‘For it ...”

“... he had to conduct conversations with – or rather deliver verbal messages to – her through a lady-in-waiting even though the duchess was seated only a few feet away. It may be true that the Emperor is supposed to have picked up a brush which Titian had dropped, but some distance must have been normal when the sitter was of high rank. Nor was a sitting ...”

“... with his ‘asinine high-pitched Bloomsbury voice’. One after another the nobs are scarified: Lady Diana Cooper, around whom ‘men of all ages flocked ... like gulls round a council tip,’ and who herself had ‘a talent for scavenging that would have done credit to a coyote’, Lady Mosley, Daphne Rae, Beatrice ...”

“... shoppers pluck polyunsaturate spreads from the shelves. ‘Eventually, I stopped one middle-aged lady, a dead ringer for Pauline from EastEnders, and asked why she had chosen the Flora, “Better for you innit?” she said, looking at me as if I was daft. “Better for me ol’ man. I wanna keep ’im just a bit longer, I do.” ’ Does Mrs Currie’s heart ...”

“... faces, cuffing and hustling them away from the cameras.9 May. Miss Shepherd’s funeral is at Our Lady of Hal, the Catholic church round the corner. The service has been slotted into the ten o’clock Mass so that, in addition to a contingent of neighbours, the congregation includes what I take to be regulars: the fat little man in thick glasses and trainers ...”

“... in which Chaplin had lived in Kennington, and Sir Ralph Richardson had just unveiled it, an old lady stopped and muttered within my hearing: ‘They’ve got the wrong house.’ They had indeed. David Robinson points out that the Chaplin family lived next door. Many specialists have tended to doubt the veracity of Chaplin’s autobiography, claiming that ...”

“... the same collection, about ‘An artist waiting in a country house’. The artist waits to see the lady, who had asked to see the man who painted the pictures. But he is kept waiting, as ‘minutes passed, unlived ... cinematic’, glimpsing the lady’s husband kissing her cheek outside the house. The ...”

“... placed Comus, the masque he wrote in 1634 and then substantially revised. A young virgin, ‘the Lady’, gets lost in the woods and encounters an evil and seductive enchanter, Comus, son of Circe. She resists his temptations and is rescued with the help of an Attendant Spirit (one of Milton’s daemons). It is hard not to see this as a trial run of Paradise ...”

“... craziness,’ Macgregor says. ‘Just think about it. Here we are in Kentish Town. A lady with the backing of the local newspaper wants a cancer drug, which she may need, but which costs £100,000. So we give it and treat her as well as we can. Then a lady in Tower Hamlets is turned down for the drug, because ...”