“... Forman wearing a skirt borrowed from a neighbour’; and the weaver Juliette Hamelcourt, once a lady in waiting to Queen Astrid of the Belgians, with her dog under one arm and a bundle of tapestries under the other. The Ansonia – which was turned into a condominium in the 1990s – boasted fewer legends. Musicians were said to like it because the walls ...”

“... coat and dress by Anna Valentine. I know that because I was peeping out of the window and heard a lady from the Daily Mail say so into her mobile phone while she stalked the pavement outside. We were about to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth, and of course the royals were late, and we, the curtain twitchers of Bloomsbury, had been ...”

“... glimpsed only in and through the world of prefabricated ‘types’: Melancholic, Coquette, Merry Lady, Tragic Actress, English Dancer, Our Dear Little Ones. Among the menfolk, there is even a Basque. These are personalities in production, or in performance, and their patent disjointedness leaves us wondering how one might categorise, let alone represent, the ...”

“... two men shouted to the sentry post: ‘Say something!’ At 10.15 a.m. at Wolliner Straße, an old lady threw a bag of oranges over the wall. At 1.13 a.m. at Korsörer Straße, two men threw a pack of cigarettes (brand Ernte 23) over the wall, saying: ‘You can smoke these.’ At 5.15 p.m. at Schulzestraße, a sixteen-year-old boy on the S-Bahn platform ...”

“... term, though, he threw away what advantages he had: thus the painfully obvious invitation of Lady Thatcher to tea and the even more obvious visit to Basra. He did badly what Blair would have done with panache. What finally threw Brown’s government off balance was the issue of owner-occupied houses and their taxation. Promising to eliminate death duties ...”

“... a Japanese Tony Curtis and a marvellously sinister woman, played by Isuzu Yamada, who recalls the Lady Macbeth figure from Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. At one point the keeper of the town’s sake shop, where Sanjuro spends much of his time, asks him if he has scripted the whole drama that is now unfolding between the two gangs. Sanjuro says, with scrupulous ...”

“... royal menagerie in an enclosure with a polished parquet floor (‘truly the boudoir of a little lady’, the keeper wrote) and Parisians, filing past to see her in their thousands, went giraffe-crazy. Shops filled with giraffe porcelain, soap, wallpaper, cravats, giraffe-print dresses; the colours of the year were ‘Giraffe belly’, ‘Giraffe in ...”

“... pages of fiction. The whole ambience of shady dealing and social climbing is recognisably that of Lady Metroland alias Mrs Beste Chetwynd. The penniless, pleasure-loving, socially ambiguous American girl, launching herself on society with only her wits and her dress sense comes straight from Edith Wharton. The helpless, boneheaded, inarticulate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”