“... never is,’ Maureen said. ‘She’s got a friend in Lawnswood.’‘Sure,’ says Michael. ‘A lady friend.’I said, ‘Stop it, the pair of you, or you’ll do your homework upstairs.’ I can’t bear it when he starts bickering. One minute he’s so grown up, the next he’s back to being ten years old.‘I’m sorry, precious,’ and he puts on his ...”

“... Cart – and glancing around the critic’s booklined study, and demonstrating what the erring lady took to be an extreme lack of sensibility, he is supposed to have remarked: ‘Books do furnish a room.’ The narrator thinks neither story is likely to be true, but that makes the nickname all the more irresistible. Drink, sex and scholarship point to one ...”

“... and exposing furtive British moves towards a pact with the Third Reich. A special target was Lady Astor, who was antisemitic and violently hostile to both France and Soviet Russia, Britain’s only plausible allies in a war with Germany. She and Lord Astor, owner of the Times, used the paper to call for negotiations with Hitler. In November ...”

“... line which goes nowhere, the statue of the Blessed Virgin standing next door to the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, the squat brick lodge of the Sons of Knute, the statue to the Unknown Norwegian. It is also quite easy to conjure something of the unyielding ferocity of the seasons in the Midwest, the winter which lasts eight months with ...”

“... behind the new-order Greer, who do we take as our role model – Joan Collins or Alan Bennett’s lady in the van? Or, to put it differently, do we or don’t we put in a bid for hormone replacement therapy? (I don’t want to get into difficulties here: Joan Collins swears she’s never had it – she only looks as if she has.) There are reasons for taking ...”

“... with cross-dressing in the theatre and fiction, might have influenced the culturally-aware young lady. The theatrical literary quality emerges clearly from the accounts of Nadezhda Durova, a soldier in the Russian wars against Napoleon, known after her initial sortie, by the Tsar at least, to be a woman, although she insisted she was unknown to others, and ...”

“... Irish ballads bringing tears to the eyes of ladies and gents in London drawing-rooms. His patron Lady Holland encouraged him to write a life of Fitzgerald which would safely sanitise him, for, as Stella Tillyard points out, there had been renewed demands for Catholic emancipation in 1830: it was desirable to depict Lord Edward Fitzgerald in the safe romantic ...”

“... apprentice the moment she found an opportunity to become resident housekeeper to the widowed Lady Fetherstonhaugh (who had once been a dairymaid). In Tono-Bungay, Wells has a wickedly funny description of teatime in the housekeeper’s room at Bladesover House, based on one of his rare visits to his mother. Between Wells’s snobbish upper servants and ...”

“... son ran off with the glamorous transsexual April Ashley it had perhaps forgotten that the first Lady Rowallan had been Alice Polson of Brown and Polson’s cornflour. Today it is celebrities who fill the public gap left by the debs, feeding our insatiable appetite for information about people of no intrinsic interest doing almost nothing. If the gossip is ...”

“... stolen clock. The presentation was made on a February day suffused with ‘greenish vapours’ in Lady Stanley’s cavernous drawing-room, ‘where the fog had also penetrated, and presently from the further end of the room, advancing through the shifting darkness, came Carlyle’. The gift brought out his self-pity in its purest form. ‘What have I to do ...”

“... and sometimes identify with death in a more enterprising sense (Jagger’s housekeeper Molly, or Lady Dedlock’s maid Mlle Hortense, who both turn out to be murderers). His narrative energies are closely bound up with his authority as preserver or destroyer of the lives he imagines. Like Nelly Dean, Dickens is seldom anything other than happy while watching ...”

“... the helpful suggestions. ‘Why don’t you send a few to card manufacturers?’, ‘How about the Lady?’ or, ‘Do a little love story for Woman’s Own instead.’ That last one’s out. I don’t know anything about love (I’ve never progressed beyond lust) and I’m not the womanly type. I’ve tried to frighten them by saying I only write obscene ...”

“... a discreet sniff at the chamber pot. If she had not fed him asparagus then perhaps some other lady had; for both sexes were convinced that the spruce vegetable possessed infallible aphrodisiac properties. Certainly it is a powerful diuretic, and gives an unmistakable and for many a not disagreeable odour to the urine (Proust’s ‘parfum’), but no more ...”

“... But his book may help to explain how it was that, although he freely confessed his lust for a Dark Lady he didn’t much like and sometimes found almost ugly, Shakespeare could repudiate any homosexual interest in Sonnet 20, while remaining obsessed with a young man whose character also left much to be desired, but whose physical beauty he evidently found ...”

“... a little bit of a verbal battle and he wound up calling me a tyrant. What he did was to take this lady who ran the little apartment house in Las Vegas where Perry Smith [one of the killers] had been, and fictionalise her way out of character. Accuracy was not his point … It was probably an insignificant thing, except I was under the impression the book was ...”