“... 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 ...”

“... life’; and he is startled by a boy in the Philippines giving a remarkable performance as Lady Macbeth and showing ‘a quality of sinister ambition that was somewhat disquieting’. He relishes the expression on the faces of a group of Rotarians and their matrons watching a cabaret consisting of four boys and girls dancing naked, painted gilt and ...”

“... that of Sir Walter Erle scouting around Corfe Castle dressed in a bear’s skin, or the formidable Lady Brilliana Harley’s ingenious resort to patriarchal ideology. Stoutly defending her Herefordshire house against the King’s forces, she replied to a call to surrender that she could not possibly do so without her absent husband’s permission. Carlton ...”

“... persistently fascinated by royalty. It is, of course, not an unusual taste, as the publication of Lady Longford’s entertaining scrapbook abundantly testifies.* She gives us, for example, the full story of the Daily Express’s scoop in 1982: ‘INTRUDER AT THE QUEEN’S BEDSIDE – She kept him talking for ten minutes ... Then a footman came to her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... work and uncomfortable dreams. Even when they are fortunate, like Mrs Hanratty in ‘Luck Be a Lady’, who has unprecedented wins at the bingo, they betray themselves. There is only one man on the Bingo Coach, and ‘She wanted him. It was as simple as that. A woman of 55, a woman with 5 children and 1 husband, who had had sexual intercourse 1332 times in ...”

“... It enabled her to reveal unexploited talents, and without it we would have been denied her Lady Wishfort, her Mrs Candour and her Connie Sachs. Our first glimpse of Beryl, tipsy after a lunch party and asleep on her bed, is something to treasure. As she sleeps, life goes on for her ten cats and a punctual window-cleaner. Beryl the eccentric, holed up ...”

“... enthusiasts, unclear. But out of the indiscernible drama, each of the too famous late poems – ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Daddy’ – comes through as at all events a craftily composed Racinian tirade. One need only compare Plath’s punctuation with Lenier’s to see the difference – the difference, that is, between a schooled and responsible poet who has ...”

“... escape from captivity in Mexico to seek their homelands, and the story of the death of the old lady in her old Scottish country house in ‘Miss Christian Jean’ are very different in their setting but similar in narrative tone. It is perhaps strange that a writer who could write with such passionate vigour of the abuses that embitter people’s lives ...”