“... 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 ...”

“... the back of the Bunter residence. David Hughes even devises a comic genesis, involving Bunter, for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Billy Bunter? ‘Bunter,’ states Hughes’s narrator firmly at the start of the novel, ‘was a character in a schoolboy paper called the Magnet. He came on the scene in 1908 when he was 14 and vanished from it, having added not a ...”

“... as a peripatetic stud on the books of an agency called Self Service. The agency is run by a butch lady called Victoria Self, who wears hausfrau braids and a blue serge suit, and who hints at painful punishments awaiting those who infringe the rules of her exotic craft. This is one apparent strand in the plot. Another is that PB, an operator so unabashedly ...”

“... stoicism in the face of extreme hardship, should carry us safely through all the rest, from ‘Lady love your cunt’ (Suck, 1971) and ‘Seduction is a four-letter word’ (Playboy, 1973) to the harbour of ‘Resettlement, Ethiopia’, 1985 (unpublished). She was delivered up, she records, to those Calabrian people in 1967: ‘they made sure I always ...”

“... charmed lives they themselves are casting a spell, and offering us a share of their good fortune. Lady Luck is the presiding deity of such narratives. But when the memoirist is a European Jew, who survived the Second World War largely as a result of his solitary and reckless decision to abandon his family and country and emigrate to Palestine at the age of ...”

“... as he made no attempt to seem glamorous, instead coming across as a middle-aged duchess not unlike Lady Montdore in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. It would be a very mixed bag of high life and low life – Diana Duff-Cooper dancing with a well-known burglar sticks in the mind – respectability and the middle classes nowhere. ‘Now that I’m ...”

“... who came out with chicken soup for an apparently dead man in the road, and when a doctor said, ‘Lady, it won’t help,’ replied: ‘Mister, it won’t hoit.’ Now, I confess, I am less sure. There are still ways in which the new dispensation is capable of doing long-term as well as short-term harm, not least by judicial abstention; but there is also ...”

“... After a honeymoon period – at an exhilarating time for the firm, with the acquittal of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in November 1960 – friction developed. Two publishing visions were in conflict. Godwin extended the list into the territory associated with Calder (Camus, Sartre, Svevo, Brecht, Genet), and moved it leftwards, with Penguin Specials ...”

“... to the train from London to Northampton, he was treated to six summer weeks in a cottage on Lady Knightley’s estate, from which he sent Treves bunches of common wildflowers that were to him as exotic and wondrous as the Victoria regia lily. Only Treves knew that his condition could only grow worse. Within four years, though he was unaware of it, the ...”

“... of need and, perhaps, suffocated desire’: ‘Sometimes you are afraid to listen to this lady.’The cousins scoop up a harmonica player called Delta Slim (a riotous Delroy Lindo). As the trio motor through Clarksdale, he recognises some men on a chain gang and tries to lift their spirits. ‘Hold your heads!’ he shouts, before an overseer blasts ...”

“... who were waiting out the Reagan era. In 1987, she succeeded in outmanoeuvring the first lady. Throughout her husband’s presidency, Nancy Reagan competed with Raisa Gorbachev for headlines at diplomatic summits, and the two women tormented each other with their various advantages (couture for Nancy, Marxist-Leninist ideology for Raisa). When the ...”

“... of Genji, when she joined the entourage of the Emperor’s daughter in the combined capacities of lady-in-waiting and literary lion. Her Diary of (chiefly) court life is, Mr Bowring considers, more probably a reconstruction in tranquillity than a compilation of day-to-day entries. It opens, in 1008 AD (Kanko 5 in the Japanese calendar of the time), with what ...”

“... he and Oscar were on bad terms ‘he came to me like a wounded stag, and I took him in.’ Lady Wilde, his mother, appears to have exerted a strong influence at this crisis: she imagined him in the dock, defying the authorities rather like Robert Emmet, and she said she would never speak to him again if he fled the country. She was a famous patriotic ...”

“... personally to have persuaded Churchill to recall Spears from the Levant. And he affronted and hurt Lady Spears, the Chicago-born writer ‘Mary Borden’, who had brought the Hadfield-Spears Ambulance Unit, fully equipped and herself its nursing boss, to the French Armies in the bitter winter of 1939-40, and headed it and its vehicles, with Union ...”