“... 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 ...”

“... image involved adding a decade and a half to my age and switching gender, but I was a very old lady in the pool, much like the brave and relentless Barbara Frietchie.Back in the real world, I looked out of the window. There was no one on the street outside. This was not unusual. In the suburbs of LA there is usually no one on the street outside. My ...”

“... in on their own. Thus there’s a painting of Philip IV by Velázquez hung next to Vermeer’s Lady with Her Maid and a self-portrait of Rembrandt in old age; none is lit, they don’t complement one another, and together look like a trio of mud-coloured pictures. It would be more sensible to arrange the collection chronologically: the way it is now, one ...”

“... not take out the minimal insurance of either neutralising the description entirely (the bag lady joke is not so funny as to be indispensable) or drawing on fictional licence and inventing a winner who in no respect (sex, age group, type of novel) could be construed as a slur on Ms Byatt – the jet-lagged Antipodean, for example? Bradbury can mount a ...”

“... been locked in a tempestuous on-again, off-again affair for some 12 years. How to tell the grand lady of Coppet what he had done – and how to stage manage the scene that was bound to ensue? He spent most of the summer of 1808 visiting Madame de Staël in Coppet – where she held court during her banishment from Paris by Napoleon – but never summoned up ...”

“... Consider the following sentences from Bloom’s lunch-time musings on aristocratic women. ‘Lady this. Powdered bosom pearls. The élite. Crème de la crème. They want special dishes to pretend they’re.’ The earliest draft of this passage, found in the famous Rosenbach manuscript which John Quinn purchased from Joyce, begins exactly as the ...”

“... Hickey’) of the Daily Express, 28 October 1986: ‘I just wanted to tell you the lady I was having dinner with last night was helping me with some research for my new book. She is a lady of the night.’ No contradiction, My Lord. We beg to submit that it is the second rather than the first of these two ...”

“... the author.) Examples come easily to hand. Byron’s attack on the Prince Regent, ‘Lines to a Lady Weeping’, was first published in the Morning Chronicle in March 1812, anonymously. The poem caused a small uproar at the time, but when he re-published it in February 1814 under his own name (among a group of short poems he printed with The Corsair) the ...”

“... affairs. This was careless. Robinson had been close to Blair – the Prime Minister and First Lady took their children on holiday to his Tuscan villa – but by December, his loyalties were clearly with Brown. He had been all but finished by successive scandals. As his reputation was shredded, the Brownites were tormented by suspicion. Unnamed ...”

“... or if it did, it happened in the privacy of Beethoven’s home.) There’s the one about Liszt the lady-killer. In reality, Liszt was more of a Cary Grant than a Clark Gable, more Don Ottavio than Don Giovanni – although he did play the latter on stage. According to Charles Rosen: ‘With his international reputation for erotic conquest already set’, Liszt ...”

“... the museum a million dollars made a frontal attack. Irwin reports it: Later that evening this lady came up to me and told me, literally told me that I was not to do this kind of thing any more, that I was no longer to perform in this way ... She just insisted that the whole thing was absolutely un-Christian and anti-American ... I was to cease and ...”

“... grandmother – my mother’s mother – Dona Tranquilina.’ Tranquilina means ‘the Quiet Old Lady’ in Spanish. ‘She was a fabulous storyteller who could tell wild tales of the supernatural with a most solemn expression on her face. As I was growing up, I often wondered whether or not her stories were truthful. Usually, I tended to believe her because ...”

“... been many little boys like that, whom wisdom and love turned into sober members of society. But Lady Montgomery – it was entirely in character that on her husband’s becoming Prelate of the Order of St Michael and St George she adopted the style of an (honorary) knight’s wife, though she had no right to it – was not wise in the management of a tough ...”

“... her name in our language is called CREDIT ... ’Tis strange to think how absolute this lady is; how despotically she governs all her actions: if you court her, you lose her, or must buy her at unreasonable rates; and if you don’t discharge her to a tittle of your agreement, she is gone, and perhaps may never come again as long as you live ...”

“... Channon (by no means out of place), and Charlie Chaplin. All the Coopers are there: Lady Diana, Duff, Gladys, Gary and Tommy. There are Douglases, from Lord Alfred to Mr and Mrs Kirk; here are the Nicholses, Beverley and Mike; and you must distinguish, if you will, between Elizabeth Taylors one (actress), two (novelist) and three (friend of ...”