“... are shits, but that I really hate left-wing people. I fell in love with Nell Dunn, whose mother. Lady Mary Campbell ... lived in the Ritz ... Nell was wearing jeans, a Peace For Me top under an Afghan waistcoat, her fine blonde hair tied up with luminous beads. I was carrying her Moroccan-carpet shoulderbag stocked with leaflets advertising a poetry-and-jazz ...”

“... oneself taking sides against Jem’s presumption of her family’s specialness. The sweet-shop lady’s irritation, for instance, on board the boat to Canada, is surely reasonable enough? In the souvenir and sweetie shop Harriet starts furiously rearranging the display of sweet rolls and little packets and boxes and so on and the shop woman glares at ...”

“... of roughly the right appearance, and to recruit actors to play all the significant roles: an old lady to fry the liver, a balding piano player, a motorbike enthusiast, a concierge. Lives will be lived on repeat while he moves through the building watching and rewatching the same trivial events unfold. While teams of investigators scour likely areas of London ...”

“... might need to earn her own living. Teaching was the only realistic option if she was to remain a lady. For Annie, this was more than an expedience. Charitable work among poor children, another task imposed by her gender and class, persuaded her that she had found a vocation. Those who knew her as a self-effacing girl would have been astonished to learn that ...”

“... in her son’s back, as Vernon reflects: I’ll tell you a learning: knife-turners like my ole lady actually spend their waking hours connecting shit into a humongous web, just like spiders. It’s true. They take every word in the fucken universe, and index it back to your knife. In the end it doesn’t matter what words you say, you feel it on your ...”

“... Take all the men who are researching something, seriously – slang in Ball of Fire, snakes in The Lady Eve (1941), dinosaurs in Bringing Up Baby, the igneous ‘tambula’ in What’s Up, Doc? (1972). It’s a way of joking about value, about what is being overvalued or undervalued as they futz around with rocks and bones. There are other screwball characters ...”

“... of money); he speaks of adoring the ‘soulful blue eyes’ and kissing the ‘velvet’ hand of Lady Garvagh (who was married to a cousin of the prime minister, George Canning), of peeping beneath the scanty rags of a comely Irish harvester, and playing charades with teenage girls in the house of Lady Morgan in ...”

“... that about right.‘We’ve always been the greatest friends’ – that is the kind of thing the lady says about her dentist or accountant, or a woman she’s known for years and years and doesn’t trust an inch. Friendship, like patriotism, is one of those things that has gone off the scale of expression. E. M. Forster managed to combine both in the ...”

“... by the eccentric, neurotic Margery Kempe: ‘hir mende was raveschyd in-to beholdyng of owr Lady offeryng hyr blisful Sone owre Savyour to the preyst Simeon in the Tempyl, as verily to hir gostly undirstondyng as [if] sche had ben ther in hir bodily presens.’ The same scene was enacted in the late medieval religious plays, which Duffy claims had a ...”

“... addition, she had been gay, with those big old teeth, long before such time as being gay and First Lady was even conceptual. She, Alison, could not hope to compete in the category of those ladies. Not yet, anyway! A lot of what’s appealing about Saunders is at loose here: his easy way with grandly deployed casual diction, the humour wrung from malapropism ...”

“... sneering at labradors & joggers disaffected deer . . . I have no news. I am boring old lady. Have to stop myself from talking to grocery clerks about my grandchildren or my cat. * One of my classes gave me a fabulous gift. It is a cup, with Denver skyline & a moon – When you pour hot coffee in it the pope appears in the sky! So dear heart – my ...”

“... These essays have something in common with Edith Holden’s The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (now available in Japanese and shortly on jigsaw puzzles), which has been on the best-seller list for nearly three years and has sold over a million and a half copies: it has some pretty pictures of cowslips and some less appealing portraits of fat, rather ...”

“... by his sending ‘a muff of gardenias’ to his niece’s coming-out ball. Her parents, Lord and Lady Glenconner, launched their daughter with Austerity-busting splendour. A marquee, a New Look dress from Dior, a pillar of dry ice and she was ‘out’. Out into what is the question that occupies the rest of the book. What is a well-connected, semi-educated ...”

“... of celebrity biographies. Gossip, of course, is important, but Antonia Fraser is too much of a lady to gossip, rather than simply allow famous names to flutter gracefully onto each page. And although I quite see that loved ones, relatives, friends want to share memories, does it really matter to the majority of us who do not know them, how much Pinter and ...”

“... wish, like you, I could console myself with reading novels or even writing them’, he wrote to Lady Londonderry in September 1857, ‘but I have lost all zest for fiction and have for many years.’ British India was in rebellion, and Britain was shocked and outraged. Disraeli was dismayed by the atrocities, but detected wild exaggeration and was one of ...”