“... an old White Russian relative of mine told me recently. Her indomitable life has included being a lady-in-waiting to a grand duchess, working as a reporter for the BBC and finally running a hostel for former mental patients. ‘I loved my lunatics,’ she said once, and then added: ‘It is love they need.’ She is 86 and she should know. When all the ...”

“... films are those no one has heard of.’ I name two for a start: Closely Observed Trains and The Lady with the Little Dog, the latter of which could take the place of Battleship Potemkin, which was always very boring. And here is another poll of more urgent interest. Forty per cent of Church of England clergy support unilateral nuclear disarmament, 49 per ...”

“... and in their spare time to entertain us with their pretty ways. We are a good deal nearer to Lady Fortescue’s Perfume from Provence than to anything by Wyndham Lewis. Perhaps that is the truth about Mr Grigson. He ought never to have fallen among literary intellectuals. It has all been a mistake. He doesn’t like them, and his liking for literature ...”

“... he took considerable pains, sending one of her pen-and-ink drawings to Time and Tide (where Lady Rhondda rejected it with the ease of long practice), and refusing to destroy some of Margaret’s letters, although he thought keeping letters a ‘mischievous habit’. ‘Your way of putting the stuff together is the right way.’ Only – and this was a ...”

“... Asya had sat on the stump of a tree and watched Deena talk to a bewildered-looking grey-haired lady ... She must be the mother of the other leftist: the independent, Asya had thought. Occasionally one of the black smocked women would walk up to the great wooden doors and bang on them and a small inset door would open and a guard would shout ‘Not yet, not ...”

“... that Keats asked, and he was pretty indignant about the answer. With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt, Enriched from ancestral merchandise, And for them many a weary hand did swelt In torched mines and noisy factories, And many once proud-quivered loins did melt In blood from stinging whip; with hollow eyes Many all day in dazzling river stood To take ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... February 1981, which also featured a number of more ‘traditional’ graffiti artists, including Lady Pink and Futura. In December 1981, the writer and performer Rene Ricard wrote in Artforum that Haring ‘is so famous now’ that he was ‘mugged by four 13-year-olds for the buttons he was carrying (as well as for his Sony Walkman)’. ‘The Radiant Child ...”

“... Michelangelo gave to Vittoria Colonna – a pious, aristocratic and extraordinarily well-connected lady – the athletic body becomes the vehicle of pathos, as it was in the pietàs which he carved both at the beginning and at the very end of his career as a sculptor. There are drawings for those here too. In drawings in which the supremely energetic body type ...”

“... presumably a reference to Thatcher’s early incarnation as the ‘Milk Snatcher’, with her Iron Lady years still to come. ‘She looked magnificent,’ our narrator tells us with Alan Clarke awe as Joyce and her cohorts deliver the Scheme’s coup de grâce fifty pages later, ‘and at that moment I realised the future belonged to people like her.’ The ...”

“... again. The group I joined consisted in Easter holidaymakers, workmen in overalls and an elderly lady perched elegantly on a capstan, who perhaps knew this would be her only chance to see a great whale. Or maybe she’d seen hundreds and was coming back for more. They are a bit addictive. Some people preferred to gaze over the water in silence as they ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the person who almost told the story on TV, believes the mother’s ghost is helping the old lady out. Agustina’s own mother disappeared around the time of the fire. Raimunda and her companions return, in the literal, mundane sense, to Madrid, and the film dives into a brisk mix of old Hollywood melodrama and new Spanish soap, with a glance at Italian ...”

“... 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 ...”