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“... the new-born kinship between a recipient and the donor’s family, especially the mother. Lesley Sharp has paid her traditional anthropological dues, studying a village in Madagascar where mortuary rituals have a central role in communal life. Now she has turned to the practices of life and death in America, in its hospitals, in the mourning of ...”

“... Hitler. To turn to Peter Longerich’s Hitler: A Life, superbly translated by Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe, is to re-encounter the sober, appraising diction that Knausgaard deplores in Kershaw’s writing. Longerich is in no doubt that his subject was emotionally ‘retarded’ and unable to feel empathy. Hitler’s early life reveals, he writes, a ...”

“... the poet and the critic know that the act of writing is both necessary and absurd. This is the sharp, precise point of ‘Swans in Flight’, where the swans circle ‘and that means that Fortinbras’s army is approaching. That Hamlet will be saved and that an extra act will be played. In all translations, in all theatres, behind all curtains and without ...”

“... another’s memory of goings-on at Greyfriars’. When, at the opening of the novel, his ex-wife Lesley remarks blandly that Billy Bunter is still alive, he thinks it’s a snide allusion to his over-eating. However, Lesley is being literal. She means that the model for Bunter has become an 89-year-old enfant terrible, at ...”

“... tries to speed Britain into joining the ‘newly submerging countries’ it is useful to have so sharp and yet so complicit a description of our vulnerability. Radji records only one person who refused his hospitality: Philip Roth (though there were others). The title is apt. Radji was indeed ‘in the service’ of a narcissistic and obsessive monarch, a ...”

“... Alma Cogan collectors’ item: a recording of Hindley and Ian Brady torturing their fourth victim, Lesley Ann Downey, while Cogan’s Christmas novelty hit ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ plays on Radio Luxembourg in the background. Being famous doesn’t just mean ‘enduring the bizarre projections of others’, Cogan explains, it means constantly being ...”

“... forgiven, and feasted together at one another’s tables,’ the editors record. A particularly sharp fight must have been fought on the nature of the entries. The editors settled on a conservative dictionary of biography format with a leavening of category entries on such topics as ‘Pseudonyms’, ‘Black Feminist Criticism’, ‘Science ...”

“... The gadges move a few steps back and watch in silence as ah cook. The fuckers will huv tae wait. Lesley comes first, eftir me. That goes without saying.’ In form, Trainspotting is made up of connected story-cycles, some told in Renton’s voice, others by his friends. The effect, weirdly, is not of remoteness but of a shockingly close emotional ...”

“... so we’ve heard, the sheep and goats are massing together in flash herds and rejoicing with old Lesley Gore songs. Real lesbian classics. (Not since Sappho … my … its … [party?] … Mytilene … naked Artemis … Judy’s turn … [cry?] …) Victory is sweet, even if glimpsed from afar. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy on Sunday denied a ...”

“... kind to everybody and still attentive and devoted to my dear old Mother, who is hale and hearty, sharp as a needle and occasionally very cross indeed.’ It must be said that Coward bore this latter crossness with humour (‘Tuesday 20 April: Mother’s and Hitler’s birthday’) – and, further, that he was broadly right about himself, as many ...”

“... Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison. Georgios (‘Yorg’ to the family but mispronounced as ‘Yog’ by Andrew Ridgeley, whose version stuck) was the youngest of three children, and the only boy. He was six months old when Lesley’s brother ...”

“... was fading: Settle made Vogue a magazine for the Bright Young Things, who, according to Lesley Blanch, a contributor, were ‘cropped, plucked and pickled in cocktails and nicotine’. Vogue positioned itself as the authority for the new style. In Rosamond Lehmann’s Invitation to the Waltz, Kate goes to a dance in an apple-green frock (made ...”

“... that it was highly unlikely that Mr Park would say that,’ MacLean wrote in her judgment.Lesley Black was one of the most senior locals employed in the Campbeltown factory. I bumped into her outside her house, a pebbledashed semi in a street of similar houses between the town centre and the fields of sheep further up the hill. We met later in a café ...”