“... for a school assignment. It was my mother. That can’t be my mother. Here was this vastly old lady Facing the camera unsmiling. My mother’s blue-eyed schizophrenia plus electroshock Had always kept her lovely skin unlined. The unlined woman of my memory and fantasy apparently Had turned into a raisin while I wasn’t looking, That I too must be ...”

“... to enjoy her journey’s fruits. She resents the Australian press labelling her as ‘the camel lady’ – which is a bit much when she insists so vigorously on reminding us that she is a woman, after all. Early on she laments the National Geographic sponsorship, wherewith ‘I’d sold a great swatch of my freedom and most of the trip’s integrity for ...”

“... he was examining the records of Zululand in 1881 that he came across a most improbable figure, Lady Florence Dixie, a reporter from the Morning Post. She is the key to this book, in the sense that it treats Late Victorian England as if it were an extension of the Dark Continent, wreathed in tribal loyalties and ritualised codes, made more vivid still by ...”

“... revelation in the book is that he had what must, I suppose, be called a ‘relationship’ with a lady, Margaret MacEwen, for over thirty years, and that nobody knew about it (though Margaret suspected that Gunn’s wife had her suspicions). Margaret has allowed this to be known and is quoted on this extraordinary situation. Not only did they meet ...”

“... go on with the show. This is generally seen as a heroic gesture, in line with the legend of lady-like sanctity that has grown up around Grenfell’s memory, but to me it sounds unattractively bossy, in the worst manner of Edwina Currie. To be forbidden to eat sweets in the theatre is surely an encroachment on civil liberties ... I prefer the kind of ...”

“... costumes and sets – as if it were looking for a slot between Young Sherlock Holmes and My Fair Lady – it has an edge which is entirely contemporary in two senses. It belongs to the actual life of the men in question, not their legacy, and it speaks to concerns of the 21st century, where science looks more like magic every day. What sparks the ...”

“... her pursuers in the Mattel building, she finds herself in a secret apartment where a kind old lady, played by Rhea Perlman, offers her a cup of tea. She says her name is Ruth, and we later learn that she is the ghost of somebody who has been dead for years. Mattel created this apartment for her because she was Ruth Handler, who invented the Barbie Doll in ...”

“... the Salon, and indeed anticipates by a decade the huge success of Paul Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Gray.It is a relief to contemplate works of art in a church rather than a museum or a crowded exhibition hall, and especially in Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, a masterpiece of 19th-century architecture, or Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which, though classed as a ...”

“... is hard to understand. 17 January. The Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker-Bowles come to The Lady in the Van. Normally royalty is guaranteed to put a frost on an audience but their presence peps things up and it’s a very good house. This is because, unlike most royal persons, the Prince of Wales actually laughs and loudly too and so gets the audience ...”

“... beloved of readers and worshipped by his friends; James was 41, known mainly for The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller, examples of the ‘international theme’ he’d mined with such singularity. He was a solitary figure, an arch-stylist who appeared to live as a ghost in the varnished rooms of his own sensibility. ‘Singleness consorts much better with ...”

“... out. I never wore the coat again, though we did smoke the dope. Being grown up and behaving like a lady were the main words of advice my mother had had for me on the way from Brighton to North London. Not such bad advice from someone for whom every new meeting held the possibility of ‘getting somewhere’. A marriage proposal – for her or me, it didn’t ...”

“... The old lady in the Sunday hat was telling her grandson the day was too hot for sale or rent. And just as she said this and wiped the backs of her hands with a Wet Wipe, a dog came padding down the opposite sidewalk before slowing to a halt outside the green house at 83 Beals Street, the house where John Kennedy was born ...”

“... win the Great Doncaster St Leger, Mr Gully’s bay colt Frankenstein (by Young Phantom, out of My Lady) failed to live up to expectations. Beaten into fourth place at the York Spring Meeting by Muley Moloch, Satan and Lot, in October Frankenstein, by now renamed Deceiver, finished last but two in the worst St Leger the Sporting Magazine’s correspondent had ...”

“... gently but firmly, for something I’d written half a lifetime previously about Delacroix’s Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking. ‘I think the drawing in it is quite marvellous,’ he said, ‘and Delacroix’s drawing in general comes to seem better and better the older I get. And the pose of Lady Macbeth’s arm reaching ...”

“... places of the town In which he whilom hadde al his plesaunce. ‘Lo, yonder saugh ich last my lady daunce; And in that temple, with hire eyen cleere, Me kaughte first my righte lady dere.’Having tried all these means of re-inventing her, he turns to narrative: Thanne thoughte he thus: ‘O blisful lord Cupide, Whan I ...”