“... a fountain – this in the presence of Robbie Turner, the son of the family’s faithful cleaning lady, who has also been sent, at the expense of the girls’ father, to Cambridge. Robbie did well there, but has now decided to start again and qualify as a doctor – one who ‘would be alive to the monstrous patterns of fate, and to the vain and comic denial ...”

“... Hofmannsthal seemed to oppose the match, Dee wrote: ‘Wish somebody would poison that f––ing Lady L. von H … She has just had a baby stuck in her tubes and I wish to god it had popped her off. But modern science has pulled her through and she is sitting around in feathered bed jackets getting in my way.’ Another of his exes published a book, which ...”

“... programme in which argumentative people seek to broadcast their disputes in front of a wise lady or a baying audience. I’m a Celebrity … Get Me out of Here! will be on later, followed by a documentary about Peter Andre, a previous contestant on I’m a Celebrity who recently split up with the nation’s most frightening glamour girl, Jordan. ITV2 ...”

“... favourite expression, ‘the family that slays together stays together’, was meant in a Lady Macbeth sort of way (previously Tassie had heard ‘sleighs’ for ‘slays’), she’s impressed, and provides a gloss: ‘Where life was meagre, where the tables were only half full, the comic triumph of the poor was the useful demi-lie. Jokes were ...”

“... his Lennon glasses and streaming down his face. Still, he is in better shape than the bloodied old lady lying flat out on the sidewalk, one eye swollen shut, while everyone else gets an eyeful of the incident.) We were accustomed to viewing the world through a set of conventional lenses that Winogrand wrenched from our face, making us conscious of how ...”

“... she is all ambition and lies; just as without all the marabou fans, she is just a naked lady with a better than average pair of legs. Frankel’s thoroughness is admirable, considering how difficult Gypsy herself made it to find out the facts of her life. Frankel tells of the dolphin-shaped handles on the basin in Gypsy’s bathroom, the ...”

“... book, tracing her fascination to a Vogue profile in June 2001, which stressed the First Lady’s lack of pretension and disdain for fashion, and to a New York Times article in October 2002 that quoted respectful comments by American writers and historians, including Justin Kaplan and David Levering Lewis, who had participated in literary gatherings ...”

“... and a cause of terrible suffering. It preoccupied physicians and the columnists of the Lady’s Magazine in equal proportions.Ray and Hackman, apparently bound together and torn apart by intense and, in Hackman’s case, ultimately ungovernable passion, were a fascinating instance. Both were seen, by many people, as victims: Ray of her ...”

“... considerably longer. In Sparta, North Carolina, high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, lives a young lady called Charlotte Simmons, an academic prodigy and a paragon of God-fearing, hard-working, down-home virtue besides. Much to the admiration of her family and her ‘gruff’, ‘dear’ mentor Miss Pennington, she wins a scholarship to Dupont University, an ...”

“... the surgeon’s knife with the stoic observation that his days as a ‘beau’ were over anyway; Lady de Lancey hunting down her missing husband on the battlefield and cradling his dying body in her arms. The fact that so many wives accompanied their officer husbands to the war zone – Thackeray described Waterloo as not so much a battlefield as a ...”

“... Sir Wyndham Braddock, ‘His Majesty’s Resident in the Combined Punjab States’, and his wife, Lady Aurelia. ‘Had it been at all possible, Sir Wyndham would have cancelled’ – the ‘situation in the Punjab is worsening’ after Colonel Dyer’s ‘action at Amritsar’. (Could Dyer have foreseen that he would become a stock minor character, not in ...”

“... the strait is named after his ships, he never made it through. Leopold McClintock, despatched by Lady Franklin to search for her husband on King William Island, tried six times to penetrate Bellot Strait during the summer of 1858 before continuing his journey by dog-sled. It took Roald Amundsen three years – including two winters lodged in the ice – to ...”

“... lithium batteries for Marlboro cigarettes, a bottle of foreign wine for a bicycle, a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the second volume of the erotic classic, Jin Ping Mei.’ Just before she dies, through the blood on her face, Su Yun sees one of her lovers sitting among the horrified audience, which gives her great satisfaction. On cue, the writer ...”

“... parents), decided they should move there. Another recent arrival on the block, a racist old lady called Isabel Vendle, plans to transform the neighbourhood into the ‘new paradise’ of ‘Boerum Hill’. The novel’s opening sentence – ‘Like a match struck in a darkened room’ – describes her delighted reaction to seeing two white girls ...”

“... emphasis on the phrase ‘what is done is done,’ and, at three in the morning, all I can hear is Lady Macbeth saying this line after the murder of Duncan, to which her husband replies: ‘We have scorched the snake, not killed it.’ Besides, what does he mean? Who did the thing that has been done? It seems a very active and particular word for the more ...”