“... forth to an art gallery one day, who should he meet but a hippy. The hippy was a beautiful young lady, rather thin but very clean, and she was known to her friends as Shoe. Shoe had wandered in many lands, pursued various trades and callings, sampled most of the religions of the earth and most of its banned substances. Sometimes Shoe sold lavender bags, or ...”

“... a seamstress’s scraps and cake mixture and the sea and ground glass and Oedipus and the moon and Lady Macbeth and marriage and footprints in the sand are jumbled together. You’re not sure what she means when she says a jigsaw is a marriage is a plate, and you’re relieved to come across a patch of direct speech. After six metaphors we get to the first bit ...”

“... the graces of a gentleman. It was he who supposedly held up a coach containing a knight and his lady and invited that lady to dance a spirited coranto with him, later accepting only £100 of the £400 her complaisant husband had with him. After execution at Tyburn his body was exposed in a tavern in St Giles where ladies ...”

“... old name for Heraklion); exiles have dealings with the sultan; the implausibly beautiful lady Alatiel finds no fewer than nine lovers, from merchants to princes, in locations ranging from Majorca to Smyrna. There are even brief glimpses of Northern Europe. The fortunes of three spendthrift brothers are revived when their agent meets a helpful abbot ...”

“... account, while still a midshipman, deserting his ship in the Seychelles and living with an exotic lady called Zela who was always clad in striped cotton ‘like a pilot fish’. Both were obsessively aquatic and Zela ended up eaten by a shark. Undeterred, Trelawney went to live at Usk in Wales with his new wife Augusta, where he would sit all day in a lake ...”

“... of dealing with the world. Macgoye seems to have most affinity with Wairimu, a Kikuyu, the oldest lady in the refuge and the one who has seen most. Of all the characters in the book, Wairimu is granted the most developed self-consciousness, so she emerges as the everywoman figure, the character whose destiny the reader takes to be representative, and around ...”

“... a tape of The Importance of Being Earnest. He himself took the part of Algernon, while the role of Lady Bracknell was hogged by a very distinguished British foreign correspondent of what might be called the old school. A large sepia photograph of the Führer frowned from a mantel. Later in the week, we were absorbing a pre-lunch cocktail when my new chum said ...”

“... production-line worker, and a character from classic fiction – Prince Genji, hero of the Lady Murasaki’s Tale. Here they are, then, four representative specimens of Nipponymity, contemplating typical aspects of Britishness and discovering all manner of links and parallels between the two island cultures – some of them amusingly absurd, some both ...”

“... to be thrown back on the services of an almost imbecile elderly creature, the companion of a lady in reduced circumstances, to whom he was referred by his hotel, and whom he later met at a local church service. What was Butler doing in church? Foreign ones counted as tourism, and besides he was always curious to find out what the enemy were up to, and ...”

“... and to scramble into a scene of military action and glory. We are not told, however, why all Lady Randolph’s efforts to use her influence failed, though a letter published in one of the 1967 companion volumes gives the clue to this. With other junior officers of the Fourth Hussars Winston had been involved in an effort to prevent a newly posted Second ...”

“... the funds for Katherine, self-exiled in Spain, one ‘bolter’ subsidising another. The old lady takes Katherine for a holiday in Portugal: the mother seems very conscious of herself as being a lady among the locals, a settler among the natives. She had been somewhat ‘alienated’ from her neighbours in her native ...”

“... anecdotally through the poem, Lord Northcliffe crazy, Lenin in the process of being mummified, Lady Conan Doyle getting in touch with her dead husband, Haile Selassie in exile, his gas bill unpaid. Stalin quizzes Pasternak on the telephone about Mandelstam, Pasternak refuses to sign the letter commiserating with Stalin on his wife’s suicide, Churchill ...”

“... his shirt in for the rest of her life, and soon found herself in the unenviable position of the lady in De Quincey’s anecdote about the Reverend Coleridge (Coleridge’s dad) who, tucking his shirt in at a dinner party, discovered that he had been ‘most laboriously stowing away, into the capacious receptacles of his own habiliments, the snowy folds of a ...”

“... writes Robinson, ‘are the stories I have heard, and they are much the same as those Lady Gregory collected here in 1898.’ The work of art, seen first from an aeroplane, the recently-discovered but ancient fossil, the legendary sea-horse and its connection with Lady Gregory’s earlier foray to the ...”

“... fell on the house when Rex Harrison described Diana the man-eater as ‘a bitch’, but the old lady laughed heartily, and the audience followed her. ‘You never said “bitch” in front of a lady in those days,’ reminisced one of the actors. No doubt that made an evening at the theatre all the more ...”