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“... like that accent. Please don’t come slouching near my bed again.’ So, real cool, I growled ‘Lady, no way you’ll walk right over me.’ Dead on. I chucked her then.                  ‘Waftage: An Irregular Ode’ The language flows as simply as blood from a wound, but how multifarious it is, borrowed and pieced together, now like a ...”

“... zealotry rule – a kind of tenth-reich Thatcherism. The heroine of Against a Dark Background, Lady Sharrow (‘I’m a fucking aristo, creep,’ she chides one underling who forgets her title), has been orphaned by Huhsz assassins. The Huhsz is a mixture of cult, multinational company, and clan, whose motives for wanting to go to any lengths to destroy ...”

“... when you have swayed from duty or from even your normal stroll beside me to bound away after some lady dog’. After Tintin’s first taste of passion, melancholy is not long establishing itself. The souring of his romance (‘You were delightful when innocent,’ says Clavdia, ‘but you’ve grown too solemn’) is accompanied by a profound political ...”

“... equal political rights with men, feminists often regard it with scepticism. Yet both the career of Lady Diana Spencer, and Angela Levin’s study of the Princess’s father and stepmother – a classic of its kind – demonstrate that, at this level at least, female influence deserves analysis. Raine Spencer (recently transformed into a French Countess) was ...”

“... fifty thousand came to pay tribute in the hall of the state Legislative Assembly. The first was a lady of 84, but most were young. Girls wrote his name across their foreheads and painted the colours of Brazil on their cheeks. President Franco, falling in the opinion polls five months before a presidential election and perhaps alarmed at the division that’s ...”

“... at the funeral service ‘his side-whiskers and the hair on his head were carefully cut off by his lady admirers’ – but it was finally achieved by Dostoevsky, in his famous speech at the ceremonies that accompanied the unveiling of the Pushkin statue in Moscow in 1880. Dostoevsky hijacked the poet for his own ideological ends. Unique among all the poets of ...”

“... not simple. Years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, I was friendly with an eccentric old lady who one day gave me a book of her poems. She had not written them all, she explained. Some had a P at the end, and they had been written by her friend, a little fairy called Pipplepopple. I must not laugh, she added quickly, or Pipplepopple would be ...”

“... a devoted family man. In that respect, he resembled Chekhov, and Chekhov’s masterpiece ‘The Lady with the Dog’ is in a sense in the background of the novel he hoped would be his own masterpiece. Of Mortal Love was published in 1936, the story of a casual love affair that turns into the real thing. Katherine Mansfield, who had deeply admired ...”

“... it. (As if I could!) The comic element is of course recognised. Toynbee was delighted to hear a lady interviewed on TV say: ‘You’ve got to believe in something. And I believe in the non-animal fat diet.’ Insatiably religious persons who have caught the virus late in life have something in common, but may differ strongly in ...”

“... like of this old house – it will tumble about our ears I reckon, one day or another, and yet my lady is always repairing it.’ The inheritance and running of the Hall are disputed by corrupt clergy, tricky lawyers, upper and lower servants representing capitalist and lower-class interests, and a gang of criminals hiding in the cellars. Smith’s plot ...”

“... the National Trust. I was apprehensive of what I might find inside. Diary of an Edwardian Country Lady beer mats? A glass cover over the ‘genuine’ sawdust sweepings? But conversation in the massively intimate snugs was anything but hushed, and the punters (lurkers and late-risers every one) standing around in the polychromatic magnificence of the tiled ...”

“... actors in Restoration plays rushed round crying ‘A pox on’t’ not ‘A gout on’t’ (though Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote: ‘People wish their enemies dead – but I do not; I say give them the gout. Give them the stone!’). The last really gouty hero of literature, we are told, was Smollett’s Squire Bramble, with all that ‘ludic ...”

“... in England, that Renaissance backwater, men and women – Robert Wakefield, William Tyndale and Lady Jane Grey – made the effort; and the man whose trail-blazing translation of the New Testament from its original Greek had paved the way for the Reformation ought logically to have done the same with me Old Testament. But Erasmus had a good Catholic’s ...”

“... reader of the tale is, at a certain point, turned against him. We side fervently with the old lady, holding out against this ‘publishing scoundrel’. Likewise, in the course of Sir Vidia’s Shadow, which is meant to make us see Naipaul as a monster, we find ourselves asking what kind of a monster wrote it. The book starts in Uganda, with a chapter ...”

“... the great liner Queen Mary, which was almost as much a ‘constancy’ in the national life as the lady after whom the vessel was named: indeed, for years this majestic symbol of Britain’s recovery upstaged the Queen in the headlines. Anne Edwards makes no claim to have unearthed new sources. Matriarch is simply a refresher course in recent royal ...”