“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cared to tolerate. In 1935, after an elaborate scam – set up, it seems, by one of his lady-friends and a shifty French-Ukrainian-Polish journalist – he fled the city with a five-year jail sentence hanging over his head, and returned to Austria. Subsequently he flirted with the Nazis (while describing Hitler, in a letter to a friend, as ‘that ...”

“... information technology and the service industries. Rural drama has given way to Riverdance, and Lady Gregory to Martin McDonagh. The passage from the premodern to the postmodern, partly eclipsing modernity proper, was smoothed by the fact that Ireland had no industrial infrastructure to dismantle. You can go postindustrial all the more easily if you never ...”

“... the Mare Nostrum search and rescue operation in the Mediterranean, the Foreign Office minister Lady Anelay claimed that such missions acted as a ‘pull factor’. The decent treatment of those who arrive in this country is regarded the same way. In October, prison inspectors examining Home Office asylum reception arrangements found two hundred newly ...”

“... into their pockets. His partner also buys lace from an elderly woman calling herself ‘the Gypsy lady’, who drops by at regular intervals with a bundle and an unhappy story.So I went back to feeling that the law-and-order posts mainly feed prejudices and spread fear: homegrown anxiety straight from the sociology of moral panics and folk devils. In recent ...”

“... it either. It’s an experiment that led to nothing – an orphan.The poem, dedicated to ‘Our Lady of Paris, in recognition of graces granted’, begins as a journey through the underworld – from south to north, or from the Left Bank to the Right Bank, on the Nord-Sud metro line (now Ligne 12):            I want a holophrase ...”

“... Since scientific tests showed it contained no glucose.Only This Morning, said the other man, a lady rang me up from the Lake District, where two years ago she and her children, while walking around the shore of a tarn, also came upon this white jelly, and on that occasion there were 16 lumps.The man from Japanese TV was hunkered down and searching in his ...”