“... 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 ...”

“... heightened her powers of observation. In English country society, ‘the men talk together; the lady of the house may be addressed once in a way as a duty – but they had rather talk together ... they have no notion that a lady’s conversation is better than a man’s.’ She was not used to such attitudes: ‘For some ...”

“... My father crossed himself and laid his pink carnations in Alyosha’s stone arms. The little lady in the headscarf took her tools out of the wheelbarrow and set to work. She scrubbed the marble plinth until we could see our reflections in it, then the marble skirting around the tomb itself. Then she scratched away at the vines and the ivy which were ...”

“... be found to mitigate a flagrant miscarriage of justice, and thus make some restitution to an old lady whose courage, dignity and faith in her husband’s innocence have never ...”

“... he becomes ‘a modern African man’. She says that his girlfriend, Nko, is ‘a modern African lady, but you are still lagging – oh, so far, far behind!’ Miss Bulewao’s next lesson begins: ‘Today we shall explore the possibility of working on biographical details, to make them look fictitious. Ete Kamba, you have to start ...’ But Ete is not ...”

“... of a safer place for Radji. But even here he comes under fire. Sitting next to him is the doughty Lady Bowker: ‘I hate the Shah, Radji, I hate him.’ Toppling monarchs seem subject to a special kind of cartographic derangement: their world map is made up only of monarchies, all of them dominoes. The most acute sufferer from tunnel royal vision would seem ...”