“... which sank into the sod like park-keepers’ spikes. The women were contenders in the Best-Dressed Lady competition (‘kindly sponsored by Brian de Staic’) and/or the Most Elegant Mother & Daughter event. I kept an unofficial book on the Best-Dressed Man handicap: my nap was a character in a five-gallon hat and red neckerchief. I had him in a double with a ...”

“... in white. The pink stone steps of somebody’s pink stucco house, the oranges we ate with some lady.’ Therapy, like artistry, works best when its effects are everywhere present and nowhere visible; the lineaments of Hornbacher’s hours on the couch are a little too obvious. And the therapeutic process seems far from complete, which makes Wasted less ...”

“... faced with the consequences. The feigning continued. ‘I do not genuinely think the Honourable Lady is accusing either the prime minister of this country or, indeed, the home secretary of racism,’ Atkins said. ‘That would be a truly extraordinary allegation to make.’ Responding to a CEO who said his company wouldn’t advertise on GB News until it ...”

“... month. The sun was too high in the sky for most of the wild creatures favoured by Artemis, the lady of wild things, potnia theron; all the rabbits and mice were hiding in the undergrowth. I went to Brauron with the poet Alicia Stallings, who recently translated the Batrachomyomachia, or The Battle between the Frogs and the Mice, an ancient mock-epic that ...”

“... dish and its contents were an invocation to Yemaja, the sea goddess, to invoke her help with the lady in the photo’s health problems. I agreed to replace the casserole and photo in the sea. I didn’t mention the fruit floating in the water but many pages I Googled cite this as a possible sacrifice to the goddess and it is perfectly OK for passers-by to ...”

“... an abrasive forensics specialist in the original series, and Catherine Coulson, aka the Log Lady. That wasn’t the only way in which Lynch seemed more self-referential and ruminative than before, or to be addressing the world beyond the fantasy. History had, in some ways, caught up with Twin Peaks: Jerry Horne was now in the legal weed business, Dr ...”

“... who wrote a dramatic account of the storm in a 3000-word letter to an unidentified ‘excellent lady’ in London, which is vividly echoed in the first scene of The Tempest. It was the survivors of that shipwreck that later became the first colonists to lay claim to Bermuda for the British. ‘It did strike me as a woeful exploitation of the primeval ...”

“... a brilliantly eccentric woman.’ ‘Oh, she was,’ Catherine said. ‘A terrifying, small Tory lady with a tight mouth. She always wore a brooch and a grey suit and had very bright eyes. Horrible to the men – “Shut up Christopher, you’re here to get the tea, not to talk!” – but very generous and nice to me. She ran the Talks department at Lime ...”

“... time, interspersed with a heavily adapted version of King Lear and Mrs Siddons’s much admired Lady Macbeth. On the new larger stages, selection was made on the basis of scenic opportunities. Henry VIII enjoyed a vogue, as did Colley Cibber’s version of Richard III, famous for the line ‘Off with his head, so much for Buckingham!’ A toy version from ...”

“... leadership transitions slid into place anyway. The populist right-wing press greeted a new Iron Lady, the Financial Times pleaded for a broad cabinet (to no avail), the liberal press worried about a dangerous, unpredictable ideologue. Dominic Cummings’s observation that Truss was ‘about as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in ...”

“... it lay in the Belle Époque bulk of the Palace of Fine Arts; for his mother, in the European-style Lady Baltimore café; for Villoro himself, it was the Torre Latinoamericana skyscraper, completed in 1956, the year he was born; for his daughter, it is the Frikiplaza, a three-storey complex devoted to video games and anime merchandise. Yet in presenting his own ...”

“... New establishments are opening all the time; they stay in business, on average, for three weeks. Lady Yvonne Sursock Cochrane, who lives in Sursock Palace in Sursock neighbourhood, is the matriarch of one of Beirut’s grand families. In 1960 she founded Apsad, a heritage organisation. It had its work cut out during the war, but peace keeps it even ...”

“... very high opinion’; thinking about her now, Freud has ‘every reason to suppose that this other lady, too, was a hysteric’. The scabs and nasal bones remind him of his own use of cocaine to reduce nasal swelling, and of a female patient who, following his example, had developed an ‘extensive necrosis of the nasal mucous membrane’. His consultation ...”

“... a hundred fish – there were 80 orphans – and a million flies. I asked the chief fishmongering lady how much the fish cost. ‘One thousand kwacha,’ she said. (About eight dollars.) ‘And what is it?’ ‘It is protein,’ she said at first. ‘Small fish. Chomba.’ There are always kiosks by the road in African countries, selling a stack of ...”

“... of her testimony and admits to the lacunae that he’s unable to fill in. But the smart old lady of West 67th Street doesn’t want to play. She knew ’em all, she was there, she is as spry as ever, and she’s keeping her own counsel. Perhaps she is readying a text of her own after all. If so, I’m quite prepared to wait for ...”