“... on them, literally kissing Rayburn’s bald head, endlessly inviting them round so that his wife, Lady Bird, could give them good ole Southern cooking and rescue them from the loneliness they dreaded. ‘Loneliness breaks the heart,’ Rayburn used to say, ‘loneliness consumes people.’ With Rayburn and Russell as a base, LBJ built up his position in the ...”

“... to take her up. Vanity Fair gushed in 1877: ‘All male London is going wild about the Beautiful Lady who has come to us from the Channel Islands ... She has a husband to make her happy, but still awaits a poet to make her known.’ Her husband most certainly did not make her happy, but Oscar Wilde volunteered for the poet’s position and spent a night ...”

“... books or staging unexpected new plays anonymously. The revelation that he was the author of The Lady of Lyons proved so humiliating to the Times in 1838 that it retaliated with an attack which W.C Macready called ‘vulgar, virulent and impotent from its display of malice’. Bulwer-Lytton was thought too delicate for education at Eton, and was tutored at ...”

“... has a young daughter of her own. In One for My Baby Alfie’s new love, Jackie Day, is a feisty lady down on her luck – she’s a cleaner. In Man and Boy Harry’s new love, Cyd, was also a feisty lady down on her luck – she was a waitress. In both novels Harry/Alfie is assaulted by the ex-boyfriend, and in both cases ...”

“... liberating from domestic drudgery and the guilt that comes of avoiding it than having a cleaning lady who loves cleaning, a child-carer who’s content with child-care, a homebody who wants nothing more than to be at home. And Martha Freud was all those things. Quite why she was those things is something that her husband might have been the very person to ...”

“... a Hollywood star, then a hard-drinking rabble-rouser, and finally a grand and rather sad old lady with a corgi and a maid living in one of those sadly grand houses in Knightsbridge. In between, she made some pictures. I read a large proportion of this book on a train, sitting opposite a woman immersed in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective ...”

“... and any lessons learned from past misjudgments will be invaluable. Often referred to as ‘The Lady’ by her supporters, Suu Kyi, who was born in 1945, is the daughter of the murdered independence leader and army chief Aung San. This helps account for the Burmese people’s devotion to her: why they flock to her speeches and keep small photos of her ...”

“... ritualised combat, though in that case the contestants were usually the champions of a cause, or a lady, or simply fighting like athletes for a prize, usually before an admiring audience. He also considers so-called judicial combat, where it was understood that God would determine a just outcome. But divine intervention was not claimed for the duel. At stake ...”

“... chimneysweep having his teeth pulled out for transplantation into the mouth of a fashionable lady, in exchange for a coin or two. Sugar from the colonies rotted the teeth, and live transplantation from the younger and more expendable was mooted as one solution, though the procedure usually failed.While Rowlandson invoked the contrast between the vain ...”

“... he draws himself wheeled in his pram by Nanny in Kensington Gardens and cooed over by a veiled lady with an ermine muff and hat, and in another illustration he is taking tea with aunts whom Lartigue would have been keen to snap. In his guides to British architecture (Pillar to Post and Homes Sweet Homes), the excesses of the latest thing are ...”

“... bet. Knowing nothing about all this, I opted for a .38 lent me by a dear old Jewish Communist lady who said: look, I always carried it but I never fired it. Other friends said there’s nothing like a shotgun. Just the sound of someone loading it and cocking it will freak out most burglars. It can shoot right through doors, after all. Robbie ...”

“... down saluting, singing a part of the words to the tune, Hirayama smiles and salutes back, even the lady running the bar salutes. The two men wonder what would have happened if Japan had won the war, and Hirayama says quite firmly that it’s better that they lost. The burden of the sequence, though, is not the war but the past, whatever the past was. This is a ...”

“... foods, exotic foods, dented tins’, the sign says) but they can’t be given a food parcel. The lady with the Sainsbury’s bag sat down in a low armchair and was given tea and cakes donated by a local café while her parcel was prepared: Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, two tins of Heinz soup, black-eyed beans, Del Monte canned peaches, tinned ...”

“... more: one night I crawled down to the sad little piano bar; I can’t even remember whether the lady artiste was topless or not. Earl Hines was on somewhere but I’d heard him quite recently in England.’ Twenty years later, Roy and his second wife, Joyce Holliday, turned up on my doorstep in San Francisco. They had been touring the American West: the ...”

“... hero’s elevation to the Captaincy of his House, to the sheer and tasteless perversity of ...”