“... painting at Daureb, in present-day Namibia, he claimed it depicted a Minoan or Egyptian ‘white lady’, painted by a visiting Mediterranean artist, and that the local Khoisan people had later ‘blackened’ other figures at the site. He simply couldn’t conceive that work of such extraordinary quality could have been made by hunter-gatherers in ...”

“... a garden, vaguely. But she was not gifted in that direction. An African violet which her cleaning lady had given her at Christmas had finally given up the ghost that very morning and she had been forced to hide it in the wardrobe out of Mrs Clegg’s way. More wasted effort. The wardrobe had gone too. They had no neighbours to speak of, or seldom ...”

“... I thought I saw a butter-pat Upon the Sussex down. I looked again and saw it was The Lady Mary Brown. And are you standing up? I said, Or are you sitting down? When he died, the Times obituary set itself to demonstrate that ‘there was no corner of the globe into which Lord Mersey had not penetrated, no adventure that he had not ...”

“... of Islam. But a few moments’ thought should begin to correct this. From the 11th century of Lady Murasaki and Sei Shonagon (that is to say, from the birth of the novel as a literary form), women not only had a central place as commentators on the world: they also put men conspicuously in their place. The Tale of Genji is full of cleareyed – even ...”

“... a day. The entry ‘Fine Day’ meant an outstanding performance, an asterisk a commonplace one. Lady Cowper was his mistress for thirty years and he married her after Lord Cowper’s death. This did not prevent his having other affairs, including a more or less permanent mistress in a Piccadilly cottage. Gladstone told his son that he had never been ...”

“... he ‘pumped’ (or ‘dumped’, ‘bumped’, ‘humped’ and other things) ‘it all into a lady’; ‘respectable’ middle-aged women who hush up their youthful abortions; ‘the Puritans who are the Gods of This World’. It’s with assertions like the last, though, that Ewart begins to lose his sense of proportion. His desire to keep hounding the ...”

“... don’t like the heat, get out of the kitchen’ (1952). ‘The opera isn’t over till the fat lady sings’ (1978). ‘If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys’ (1966). ‘Garbage in, garbage out’ (1964): or, do preparedly programme the thing properly. This dictionary is an excellent accession to the Oxford list of the best dictionaries there are. It is in ...”

“... his memories of the expedition. Finally, within sight of England, his surviving greyhound bitch, Lady, universally loved among the crew, was heard to howl out in the night. The next morning she was found flung across a chair in the cabin, still guarding Banks’s writing table, but dead. Two weeks later Banks is in London, ‘shattered and disoriented’. I ...”

“... way you looked. Young, in general, was not a good look. Young female trumped male, but the young lady was supposed to be just that, a lady. Halter tops and nose-rings didn’t fly. Manners were big with Bruno. In his view, the ‘young today have no manners. I feel badly for their parents.’ Flash was never ...”

“... here Antony Crolla comes across the railway bridge at the top of Gloucester Crescent, where an old lady is feeding the pigeons. Rounding the corner he finds a man at the edge of the flock of birds who, without any concealment at all, is taking out his cock to have a pee. Crolla, outraged at this, shouts: ‘Here, mate. You can put that away right now.’ The ...”

“... where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to us’), Sontag keeps her cool in a raucous ...”

“... for Cleaning Women is to experience Berlin as a romanesco, or the hall of mirrors scene in The Lady from Shanghai. She approaches the same material in so many different ways, in so many different stories, that you see the art in action. (Not always the art, sometimes the workshop. Sometimes it reads as fiddling or coyness.) Try this now, or try that, or ...”

“... idealistic romantic nihilism of the decade. The freedom of language heralded by the acquittal of Lady Chatterley, the freedom of sexual action offered by the pill, and the distrust of almost any kind of organisation plus an overwhelming stress on the importance of individual fulfilment, combined to impress readers who loved the hyperbole and rhetoric, shared ...”

“... Parsis were staunch supporters of the British in India, and on their marriage, Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer received a set of embroidered doylies from the Parsi community of Bombay. There are elements of the same loyalty in The Golden Thread. Not for this author the arms-length distrust of the British as tight-lipped and thin-blooded. She admires ...”