“... gallery attendant walked past and was identified as ‘charwoman, char, cleaning woman, cleaning lady, woman’. And ‘sweeper’. The algorithm at work here – developed under the direction of Paglen and Kate Crawford, who researches the social implications of AI – is trained on a dataset called ImageNet, a project launched in 2009 by computer ...”

“... bed, Jewish pink cushions, down ... The soldiers’ crutches knock. Again: ‘Give us something, lady.’ They flop down with their top-knots hanging loosely. They are dressed for war, with their army-issue fur-hats. And their stumps hang down bravely ... The women have brown faces ... None of them has slept. Duvid the Disciple is in his waistcoat and says ...”

“... opposition, his approach was made through the Cliveden set. It was the best contact he had, since Lady Astor’s son David was his friend. Besides, Chamberlain was in power: however strongly Trott may have deplored his stance, the Prime Minister was the man he had to influence. The third reason is this: in order to be able to travel and fulfil his ...”

“... venting of pique will become clear when the new franchises start up in January. Once the lady had been unhorsed, however, the steam seemed to go out of the relationship. Early in the Gulf War, John Major was invited by one of his more neanderthal backbenchers to indulge in a routine spot of BBC-bashing during Prime Minister’s Questions in the ...”

“... 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 ...”