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“... 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 ...”

“... swamp and called it La Ciudad de Nuestra Señora Santa María de Buen Aire, or the City of Our Lady Saint Mary of Good Air. It is just possible that the final Spanish phrase means ‘of good aspect’, but that would still be quite a splash of bravura. Almost everyone in Buenos Aires tells you that this is an Italian city, in spite of the fact that it ...”

“... the fastest-growing job category, it is also fashionable, with Kanye West signed on at the Gap and Lady Gaga in line to be taught about millinery by Philip Treacy. In Intern Nation, Ross Perlin, a survivor of serial internships on three continents, describes the lengths to which graduates must go to secure an unpaid intern position (often the first of ...”

“... he asks for ‘the full gas’. On his way out, he points at Connie and says: ‘I would fuck that lady.’ So far, so wacky. But then he tells O’Rourke, with ‘sour anaesthetic breath’, that he’s ‘off to Israel’ – not because he’s Jewish but because ‘I’m an Ulm, and so are you!’ O’Rourke thinks no more about the incident (‘gas makes ...”

“... pathetic triviality’, though he later fell foul of the regulations himself. So did Lady Astor, Lord Donegall and the army’s provost marshal, no less. It was a smart move by the authorities to target these figures. It was smart, too (though not mentioned here), to make such a play of the king’s and Churchill’s strict adherence to food ...”

“... Blues’, W.H. Auden Marseille is an old-fashioned town. ‘You still have a queen,’ the lady checking museum tickets remarked. ‘So why don’t you cut her throat? Kings and queens are pointless, cost a fortune.’ Red Republicanism, 1793 brand, is not extinct here. This year, Marseille is a European Capital of Culture, which means it must make a ...”

“... scalp. Then Mrs Baker, who had looked to Mary like any other powdered, wrinkled, grey little old lady when she came in, began to look monstrous. Her opened out, upside-down face came alive. Her pulled-back hair revealed a line where her foundation ended in a tidemark. Mary imagined peeling it off like a mask. Her face powder caught in the down on her cheeks ...”

“... the tiger esteemed one of the most beautiful as well as the most ferocious of animals?’ to which Lady Collins replies with a verbatim recital of Conran’s letter. The story was also related in The Third Chapter of Accidents and Remarkable Events Containing Caution and Instruction for Children (1801); Scenes in Asia for the Amusement and Instruction of ...”