“... with a picture of the Virgin Mary and a phone number on the back where she can be reached: ‘Our lady has granted her presence to people just like you.’ The Virgin Mary is their good fairy and stern mother. Like their real mother, she denies their sexuality, their changing bodies; only in death can they be immaculate. Jeffrey Eugenides writes well; his ...”

“... spring from a conscious mature assessment. It was in a despairing mood that they submitted to the lady and paved the way for the first woman prime minister in Western Europe.’ Then, to make matters worse, she isn’t the sort of woman a woman ought to be. Mr Abse doesn’t actually say that every woman should stay at home, look after the children and ...”

“... excessively strange as when blackthorn blossom turns into ‘the frock on a dark, small, angular lady’. Straining a bit for effect? No doubt, but outrageous metaphor like this keeps you alert. Les Murray is a rarity, a poet with a gift of the gab used not for self-regarding rhetoric but for storytelling, a man writing with unstrained and often moving ...”

“... away from the marvellous texture of the poems by making them into performances.’ Her kind was Lady Lazarus, the come-back queen. ‘I do not want to be known as the mad-suicide poet, the live Sylvia Plath,’ she told her students at Boston University: but she auditioned for the role and rehearsed it in book after book until she wrapped herself in her ...”

“... destroy all one’s judgment – turn one into an ape.’ For an upper-middle-class young lady, born in the reign of Victoria, these were unusual sentiments. Song of Love provides a much clearer picture of Noel’s character than could be seen in the documents previously available. She told Rupert that when she was a child Edward Garnett had looked ...”

“... globe, commonly by readers who couldn’t begin to negotiate them in the original. Cervantes and Lady Murasaki have the gift of universality. What, then, does the Chin P’ing Mei have to offer the general reader? In its first volume, anyway, the book achieves one of the primary goals of satire, creating characters of sufficient vexatiousness that the reader ...”

“... the publication in ten years’ time of a spate of works of self-justification: Not One of Us by Lady Grantham, Going Down with the Ship by Sir Ian Gilmour, The Non-Playing Captain of the Wets by Lord Whitelaw and The Broken Reed by Messrs Sherman and Strauss. We shall have to wait until Willie tells the story of his encounter with Margaret in a room behind ...”

“... enough to criticise her poetry, irresistibly recalls another Edith – Edith Evans playing Lady Bracknell. But there is always the possibility that the richly comic side of these scenes was not wholly unintended, that the affronted dignity was deliberately pushed to the edge of the absurd. And then a very different picture comes to mind – the pathos ...”

“... coiffeured John Bond (I was gratified the other day by a newspaper reference to Bond’s ‘Lady Di’ hair-do – surely, after that, he’ll get it cropped?). Bond has described himself on television as ‘flamboyant’, which he seems to think has something to do with champagne, cigars, sheepskin, Malcolm Allison and ‘being myself, I can’t help ...”

“... seamen parodying the dances of their betters. A love affair begins between our hero and a young lady aboard the frigate. The guilty officer is silently exchanged for a handsome young fellow who has been having to do with the wife of the frigate’s captain; he becomes an important figure in the continuing story. But all these developments are related to the ...”

“... for her mother has slipped off to Mozambique with a Portuguese. One of the aunts is a cultivated, lady-like matron with no political interests. The other is a keen advocate of African rights, married to an urgent lawyer: they send their son to school in an independent African state, to humanise him, but they know he will be conscripted into the South African ...”

“... of the approved constitution – this can be seen, for example, in pictures of the birth of Our Lady. But such an expedient was itself something of a dietetic insult to the system, since wet-nursing by a woman other than the mother violates the immunity mechanism, a system so remarkably adapted to circumstance that the fouling of the mother’s breast by ...”

“... somnambulists and incubus-sufferers attend summer camp to be cured of their sleep problems. ‘Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows’ is a Peeping Tom parable about two boys who hide under a table to watch an adults-only night at an ice skating rink, which descends into an orgy masked by swirls of fake snow. The stories are about the limits of ...”

“... the North Sands shipyard. The ‘bronchial blast’ of a hooter sounded, startling Macmillan. ‘Lady Dorothy was quicker on the uptake. “When the whistle blows,” she explained, “they all go off for their luncheon.”’ Brien, a native of the region, and indeed of the working class, was not slow to pounce. There are no quotations from Liberace, but ...”

“... than the depiction of people. The portrait of a continent is not the same as the portrait of a lady, say, and neither is a ‘portrait of the times’, the title of a vast and dazzling exhibition of contemporary Chinese art – around 120 artists and several hundred works – at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai (until 10 November), a former power plant ...”