“... including some juxtapositions of a Church of Ireland bishop with a stotious boarding-house lady which might have fitted into The Old Boys, or The Boarding-House. Trevor’s precisions and indirections are impressively matched in David Profumo’s Sea Music, a first novel which restricts itself to a summer holiday in the early Fifties (a few years ...”

“... most are real: Lord Melchett (Morgan’s 19-year-old buddy), Lord Astor and his bride, Lord and Lady Duff Gordon, a Frick, a Vanderbilt, Mr and Mrs Straus who own Macy’s, and also Thomas Andrews, the architect of the Titanic, and Bruce Ismay, a White Star official. Real or fictional, they divide roughly into a group of young bloods and flappers, on the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had eight children, one of whom married Stanford White’s only child Lawrence. This Chanler lady, if you remember, became ‘Mama’ – Lessard’s grandmother with the second-generation liquid jewel/wine face. The Chanlers were amusing and artistic as well as classy. Some were painters, sculptors and musicians; all could write a sonnet at the drop of ...”

“... of recent years, the unlawful funding of the Pergau Dam in Malaysia, involved not him but Lady Thatcher and the saintly Douglas Hurd. It is also said that Michael Howard has demeaned his high office by using legislation to embarrass the Opposition. Much is made in this regard of such monstrosities as the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill and the ...”

“... take it or leave it. That’s what shows in Frank O’Hara’s great poem of 1959, ‘The Day Lady Died’, when he buys himself a hamburger and a malted and ‘an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days’. Subsequently, foreign titles had something of the status of evidence, or alibi: an increasingly mendacious and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... nouveau riche; a ragged fisher-boy; that African lad and a jester in blackface; a crazy old lady in the local and a posh little girl’s impeccable young nurse: he does his utmost to catch every eye and achieve an understanding. From which, I read decency into Hals. The prevailing smiliness suggests he’s been venturing wisecracks. But if they fail to ...”

“... The Water Babies (1863), the chimney-sweep Tom meets the last great auk, a ‘very grand old lady’ sitting on ‘Allalonestone’ who tells the story of their extinction before weeping tears of pure oil. It’s revealing – if not surprising – that the grief is attributed to a maiden aunt. If male scientists felt grief at the idea of ...”

“... cast of bourgeoisie. The appearance of public togetherness disguised a reality wherein the titled lady dismissed the wife of a city merchant and the wealthy Yorkshire gentleman rarely conversed with a lord. Vauxhall might have resembled an enchanted wood, but prince and pauper knew their place, even in ...”

“... his name as Cecil Graham, which Wilde was to use twenty years later as the name of a character in Lady Windermere’s Fan. He knew of Fanny and Stella, having read an account of their exploits in a pornographic work from which McKenna quotes with a certain relish. The arrest was a worrying moment for John Fiske, the American consul in Edinburgh, whose love ...”