“... she’d discovered. I’m not sure about Polar Stampede. Assault on the Solar Plexus ditto. Happy Lady, by contrast, is exquisite pictorial comedy with title to match. I was dreading finding the big 1960s paintings overblown – ‘big statements’. Bad reproductions and worse recollections of canvases like Polar Stampede littered my mind. The real things ...”

“... up and down steep hills, to listen to the singing of Amy Shuard; and the portrait of a beloved old lady, a sexy mother-figure, German by origin, who returns to Germany just before the war breaks out and of whose death in an Allied bombing-raid the narrator learns in circumstances which are peculiarly tormenting to him. And finally there is the undoing of ...”

“... sisters who have lived all their lives in the same house, with a ‘silver-framed photograph of Lady Diana’ and ‘ranks of bridal dolls’. Ivy gives Shakespeare a diary of the most important events of her life: Cow shed started, 6 June 1940 Maud got her false teeth, 22 September 1941 We had electric light put through, 9 July 1943 Uncle Joe passed ...”

“... only 16 humans in the world under the protection of the Secret Service – the president, first lady and first daughter, the VP and the second family, ex-presidents and ex-first family members (imagine that . . . an entire agency organised around 16 beating hearts) – and 16 lives meant 16 details.’ A riot breaks out in Illinois after flash flooding, and ...”

“... united to honour her,’ he wrote; ‘the aristocracy of letters gathered round the gentle lady, who was justly esteemed the most illustrious figure that has arisen in literature since Goethe died.’ Queen Victoria’s daughters, eager to meet her, even arranged to have the Leweses invited to dinner parties, one of which Dean Stanley himself ...”

“... Ms Jong abandoned in the mid-1960s. There is clearly a market for this kind of thing. ‘Another Lady’ and yet another personage have presumably made substantial sums with their pedestrian efforts to complete two of Jane Austen’s unfinished novels, Sanditon and The Watsons. Georgette Heyer, imitating no one in particular, for years kept a faithful ...”

“... limbs of steel ... a one-armed soldier using his good hand to salute a heavily bemedalled lady who had just passed him a biscuit; a colonel, his fly wide open, embracing a nurse ... a skeleton dressed up as a recruit taking a medical’. The descriptions alone give some notion of why this work, and the more politically overt drawings of the post-war ...”

“... out of date.’ ‘Tea with Mrs Bittell’ chronicles the relationship between a rich, lonely old lady and a young homosexual shop assistant; like other recent stories with elderly protagonists, it also quietly charts collisions of period and class, and shows a keen, wry sense of the displacements worked by social change and old age. Sidney’s understanding ...”

“... look, fancy that, they used to be at university together, you know.’ It was the name of the lady principal of Somerville College, Oxford, Daphne Park, who has, we read here, a history of an elusive kind in Zambia and the Congo. One or two of the other names on the list I had already come across personally, in a similarly disconcerting way. I remember ...”

“... the motionless statues, tramps asleep ‘like litter on the grass’, a de la Mareish old, old lady that nobody knows and a young man who is not quite right in the head. Though he wrote, with great facility, plays, epitaphs, harlequinades, Humbert Wolfe is most himself in the tiny Georgian lyric which turns so adroitly to satire. He took a risk here, as he ...”

“... Sapper or Buchan than they do to Freud. D.H. Lawrence is reproved for squeamishly supposing that Lady Ottoline’s cervix was sharp enough to lacerate him. ‘Now, if this had been physically true, any man capable of blowing his own nose and fond of the woman could have handled it, I suggest, by wearing plasticine under a French letter.’ The remarks about ...”

“... Things look bad for the United Kingdom when its female Prime Minister – perhaps to become the Lady Finchley later alluded to – gives way to Dr Charon. The events narrated take place approximately ten years hence. The ‘papers’ are variously the records of Oi Paz himself, official reports, newspaper cuttings and, in particular, the field notes and ...”

“... there to say about it? Why should Coetzee devote 12 essays to the subject, on topics including the Lady Chatterley trial, the persecution of Osip Mandelstam and the censorship regime in apartheid South Africa? Especially when a current survey of Coetzee’s work says that ‘it is a measure of his subtlety that none of his books have been banned in South ...”

“... breath: ‘I’d give it to my granddaughter Jeannie tomorrow it only she would settle down.’ (Lady Jean Campbell, herself an Evening Standard contributor, who had taken me to the lunch, had just started going out with Norman Mailer.) But what I now think was probably genuine was the acknowledgment on the proprietor’s part that Wintour enjoyed ...”

“... the piano lessons, but Madame Richter is still present, making sure it is done right. The old lady ‘seemed not to have changed, except that she had only a few strands of her white hair left and almost no teeth. Even her black coat looked the same, green with age and threadbare.’ Here one must feel sympathy with the novelist labouring under ...”