“... of an architect of uncertain social origins and a German name perhaps strengthened her resolve. (Lady Edith soon became close to her son-in-law, who designed her a wonderful house, Homewood, on the Knebworth estate.) From the start, Emily was an outsider in her own home; when she was Lutyens’s fiancée, she began to sew their entwined initials on the bed ...”

“... In twenty years,’ Lady Astor used to say of Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, ‘I’ve never known Philip to be wrong on foreign politics.’ Though Lothian himself thought much the same, it is, in fact, harder to think of an occasion when he was right. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the strongly anti-Nazi head of the Foreign Office in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an incurably superficial Johnny-Know-All ...”

“... control the rate of inflation. Indeed, they hold the second of these much more strongly than the Lady herself did, while the first only encourages the worst habits of British businessmen. How long this historically bizarre policy can be followed is anyone’s guess. Much depends, presumably, on how easily we can continue to fund the huge current account ...”

“... an illegitimate child, excruciatingly humiliating in her day. Virginia Woolf, another sharp-eyed lady, wrote that all West’s difficulty came from ‘the weals and scars left by the hoofmarks of Wells’. (She also had comments about dirty nails and so on; Rebecca, for her part, would not ‘have fed a dog’ from one of Vanessa Bell’s plates, and ...”

“... is true, that history actually follows fashion. ‘Lucille’, the nom de salon of the couturière Lady Duff Gordon, was convinced that the short skirts and clean, liberated lines of interwar styles were entirely a product of the fashion houses’ need to economise. ‘Critics wrote learnedly of the “modern girl’s emancipation”,’ she noted ...”

“... state and its actors are mostly absent, replaced by charlatans and frauds who will fleece an old lady for all she’s worth. Alarmingly, many of her rogues have a history of work in care homes or hospitals. Her writing has been compared to that of Muriel Spark, Anita Brookner and Dahl, on the grounds that her approach to cruelty is placid, even-toned. It can ...”

“... Polish guys, but they said they already had enough and had a long way to walk home. An old black lady in a claret hat came round and picked up items here and there. ‘Very good here,’ she said. ‘Terrible to waste things just like this.’ ‘This is England now,’ I said to Alf, his face lighted somewhat ghoulishly under the lamp on his ...”

“... landlady, landlady’s daughter, hero, hero’s friend, jealous rival or enemy, vicar, elderly lady or aunt, practical joker (the influence of Kipling here), comedy foreigner, censorious neighbour, returning husband or foreigner, mysterious lodger. All, of course, were interchangeable, ready both to act and to be acted upon. Many years later, when I heard ...”

“... offices in the place Beauvau. (The dream outcome for Washington would have been an old-lady-and-the-fly sequence: the rabbit is swallowed by the dog, the dog is swallowed by Sarkozy and finally the would-be president is swallowed by the senior emissary of the United States – and France lives happily ever after in the belly of the beast.) Three ...”

“... is thanks to some close contact with the wizardly spice, or some secret teaching by his mother, Lady Jessica, played by Rebecca Ferguson. Both films are driven by a benign Oedipal romance. The father dies and the son gets to hang out with his mum, but there is no aggression or lust.Jessica belongs to a sisterhood called the Bene Gesserit, whose members have ...”

“... the second Orson Welles. She is the urban exception in the wild country, the elaborately dressed lady with the fancy hairdo who knows more about life than any of the cowboys or prospectors. She is indispensable, if not to the West then certainly to the Western: the fashionable floozy, the woman with a past. But she is also, and it’s hard to think of ...”

“... an outdoor show called ‘Star Lasso’, desert and mountains behind him. The audience includes a lady with a veil, to whom Ricky makes a special salute. She was an actress as a child, the only other survivor of the chimpanzee attack. A flicker of wind on the veil allows us to see her disfigured face. She might well be a reminder that aliens can be close to ...”

“... resolves spontaneously – is the facial scarring caused by its pocks, of the kind that affected Lady Mary Wortley Montagu after her recovery from smallpox in 1715. The likelihood of finding how the virus got out of Africa is low, and it is too early to tell whether the current outbreak will fizzle out or linger in the MSM network. It is a manifestation of ...”

“... a form of bolero. It’s pleasant and sad, not at all threatening. In the film, an old lady keeps asking Seo-rae to play it for her. It is about getting lost in the ...”

“... hyper for Evelyn to encounter her daughter as the evil queen of the multiverse, dressed like Lady Gaga and bent on the destruction of all forms of life, but it is still continuous with the existing problem: Evelyn can’t listen to Joy, and she can’t change her. The same goes for Joy’s own embrace of nothing: extreme, but what else is she to believe ...”