“... modern literature, the history of cinema, a case of homosexual-style blasphemy (which precedes the Lady Chatterley case), homosexual marriage blessed by autocephalic archbishops, and much else, including in a limited sense the life of Toomey’s creator. Here is, if not exactly God’s plenty, plenty of the Devil. At the age of 14 Toomey is seduced by George ...”

“... of location work is provided, indirectly, by a character in Theroux’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’: He thought: All travellers are like aging women, now homely beauties; the strange land flirts, then jilts and makes a fool of the stranger. There is less risk, at home, in making a jackass of yourself: you know the rules there. The observation is ...”

“... of her front teeth fell out into the snow in front of a firehouse. A fireman came out and said, “Lady can I help you?” “Oh, my pearl,” she said. “I dropped my pearl.”’Throughout her brief, blazing career, Darling worked hard to appear superficial. Her topics of conversation were lipstick, hair, clothes, stockings, stars, men: light, breezy salon ...”

“... daughters, feared for their internal organs. ‘She used to tell us a dreadful moral tale about a lady who laced herself so hard that she cut her liver right in half.’Structural transformations of the figure weren’t limited to the upper half of the body. In the early 18th century there was a vogue for gigantic skirts, which had to be supported by ...”

“... of bumbling golfers, based on characters first brought to the screen by Alfred Hitchcock in The Lady Vanishes (1938). This segment divides critics: the sight of two men competing for a trophy wife now seems tedious and distasteful (even in 1945 US distributors filleted it out, doing little harm to the overarching story). But just when Dead of Night seems ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... what they were not like. In page after page Edith Thompson examined the personalities of Lady Sarah Ides, Cesare Carelli or the Princess Mancelli with the ferocious attention of a Dallas fan. ‘About Dolores darlint – I dont agree with you at all about her not liking her husband’; ‘I didnt like Theo myself’; ‘I like Clarie – she is so ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... off Boofy’s large pet badger, which would ‘snuffle round our knees in the drawing-room while Lady Arran served us tea’. Arran was responsible for the Badger Protection Act but his ardour cooled somewhat after his wife was attacked and almost killed by a group of badgers on a Scottish island. Arran announced in his newspaper column that he had decided ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”