“... Ill take it!​ ’ I said, glancing round the empty apartment. The lady didn’t smile or show any sign of agreement. I was beginning to feel uneasy. She’d looked up at me questioningly when I knocked on the open door of her office a few minutes earlier. Something about me must have given me away. The new blocks of flats were in a perfect location, halfway between my village and Nahariyya, a small seaside town in the Galilee ...”

“... who continued to read the description of the Ottoman Empire by the Russells’ contemporary Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and later accounts by Sir Richard Burton or Gertrude Bell, ignored the Russells. A new imperial readership expected ‘serious’ writers like Burckhardt (who was sent to Aleppo in 1809 to study how to disguise himself as a Muslim) to ...”

“... jiggy on a Saturday night. At the Royalty in Southgate, the Goldmine in Canvey Island, the Lacy Lady in Ilford, Raquel’s in Rayleigh, the New Penny in Watford, the kids in their mother’s pussy-bow blouses were getting into what Dylan Jones calls ‘a decade of cultural deregulation’. ‘We all wanted to escape into something that wasn’t really ...”

“... Everyone​knows that Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC asked an Old Bailey jury in 1960 whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a book they would want their wives or servants to read. The jury – which included three women – is said to have laughed. Its acquittal of Penguin on a charge of violating the newly minted Obscene Publications Act 1959 is widely regarded as a turning point in the centuries-long persecution of literature and philosophy in the name of morality ...”

“... in poems as ‘Like a faun my head uplifted/In delicate mists’, and an imagined lover as ‘the lady in the leopard’s skin’ with ‘roses in her waving hair’. Even in an ambitious later poem like ‘The Analysis of Love’, where the manner of Donne is deliberately invoked, the images have a vagueness remote from metaphysical exactness, as in verses ...”

“... been argued that there may have been something a touch ambivalent about the Nazerene himself; no lady-killer, at any rate. Tom emphatically did not get on with either his father or his mother, but he has and had that in common with many docile and patriotic heterosexuals. Moreover, as anyone with any Foreign Office or SIS experience will tell you, there were ...”

“... once have been, an introduction to Winnie Mandela – who sat silently by – but to a frail old lady of 86, the widow of the former ANC leader and Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Chief Albert Luthuli. It was a master card to play, not merely because of the continuing public ambivalence towards Winnie, but because Chief Albert Luthuli still occupies a special ...”

“... the box, their surgeon and his mate leaning out of the windows, and all of them now joined by the lady on deck, singing Ah tutti contenti saremo cosi, ah tutti contenti saremo, saremo cosi, with surprisingly melodious full-throated happiness.’ O’Brian sustains threads of narrative and develops relationships rather as the voices may be imagined carrying ...”

“... hand and a sharp knife; there is something horrid in his own account of how he cured a noble lady of a drooping eyelid, she calling out while he operated, ‘You hurt me! you hurt me!’ he replying, ‘Remember lady, beauty! beauty!’; but it is hard to see that he was doing anything more than many a respectable but ...”

“... but a series of them. The narrator has just slept with his girlfriend’s sister; ‘a fresh old lady who had never had a bad thought in her life’ appears from down the stair. An old man is intent on confessing something terrible; there’s ‘a fuisty smell of shit which suggests this old bloke needs his bum wiped’. It transpires that at some point in ...”

“... rested. It is fortunate, then, that he makes it clear thoughout this book that he admires the lady – indeed, he goes further and pays her the ultimate compliment of declaring that she is the politician most like him, since she puts country and conviction before party loyalties. Coming from Dr Death, this is of some interest. Moreover, he also makes it ...”

“... there is already a fin-de-siècle air about memoirs of the Thatcher era. It seems so long ago. The lady herself clutches on to a form of political existence more as a menace than a force. She rages, more in reported than direct speech, against developments in the European Community. She has a group of followers on the backbenches who continue to see her as a ...”

“... or a female personification. The Latin god Autumnus was male, but there seems no doubt Keats had a lady in mind. None the less the perfect balance of the poem does seem to depend on a kind of neutral stasis of the sexual and sensual elements within it. Worth remembering, though, that Keats’s feelings and raptnesses were usually far from integrated. He ...”

“... her vagina. His mother is a successful faith-healer, assisted by a Red Indian spirit guide and a lady from the court of Marie Antoinette. (Do they never come from less celebrated areas, like, say, the Windward Isles or the court of Henry III?) The father sells a popular placebo, made of garlic-flavoured water, and this helps to finance the spiritualist ...”

“... just as they accept that Mrs Thatcher, in becoming a tough and warlike leader, had perforce, like Lady Macbeth, to unsex herself, an assumption fatuously confirmed by President Reagan some years ago when he called Mrs Thatcher ‘the best man amongst us’. Though Caroline Blackwood finds the militant lesbianism of a few of the Greenham women regrettable ...”