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“... shoppers pluck polyunsaturate spreads from the shelves. ‘Eventually, I stopped one middle-aged lady, a dead ringer for Pauline from EastEnders, and asked why she had chosen the Flora, “Better for you innit?” she said, looking at me as if I was daft. “Better for me ol’ man. I wanna keep ’im just a bit longer, I do.” ’ Does Mrs Currie’s heart ...”

“... faces, cuffing and hustling them away from the cameras.9 May. Miss Shepherd’s funeral is at Our Lady of Hal, the Catholic church round the corner. The service has been slotted into the ten o’clock Mass so that, in addition to a contingent of neighbours, the congregation includes what I take to be regulars: the fat little man in thick glasses and trainers ...”

“... in which Chaplin had lived in Kennington, and Sir Ralph Richardson had just unveiled it, an old lady stopped and muttered within my hearing: ‘They’ve got the wrong house.’ They had indeed. David Robinson points out that the Chaplin family lived next door. Many specialists have tended to doubt the veracity of Chaplin’s autobiography, claiming that ...”

“... the same collection, about ‘An artist waiting in a country house’. The artist waits to see the lady, who had asked to see the man who painted the pictures. But he is kept waiting, as ‘minutes passed, unlived ... cinematic’, glimpsing the lady’s husband kissing her cheek outside the house. The ...”

“... placed Comus, the masque he wrote in 1634 and then substantially revised. A young virgin, ‘the Lady’, gets lost in the woods and encounters an evil and seductive enchanter, Comus, son of Circe. She resists his temptations and is rescued with the help of an Attendant Spirit (one of Milton’s daemons). It is hard not to see this as a trial run of Paradise ...”

“... craziness,’ Macgregor says. ‘Just think about it. Here we are in Kentish Town. A lady with the backing of the local newspaper wants a cancer drug, which she may need, but which costs £100,000. So we give it and treat her as well as we can. Then a lady in Tower Hamlets is turned down for the drug, because ...”

“... is unclear, and their identity is uncertain. But their names are usually given as George and Lady Mary Hamilton. The daughter appears to have been Sophia St John Hamilton. Just then Foscolo was brushing up his English by reading Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, which he later translated into Italian. The Hamiltons’ dashing and accommodating ...”

“... was a wonder, a legend. The writer Alexander Kinglake said that when he was a child in the 1820s Lady Hester Stanhope’s name was as well known to him as Robinson Crusoe’s, though he thought Crusoe was more believable. A century later, her table-talk (retailed in six volumes by her doctor-companion, Charles Meryon, and first published in 1845-46) was ...”

“... so that we saw the great mass of upturned faces at one moment and at the next were peering through Lady Diana’s veil. Was she nervous today? Might we see a tear? Does the camera extend our perception? Or does it, by seeing what our naked eye can never see, confuse our relationship with the thing we look at? Is it the camera or our own fantasies about royalty ...”

“... Charles Chaplin. Orson’s view was that he had first thought of the comedy about the French lady-killer Landru, a modern Bluebeard, which in 1947 became Monsieur Verdoux. He had already described its essence in 1941: There is one tableau, and it is the key to the whole film. There is Chaplin, dapper and blithe, clipping the hedges, making his hands and ...”

“... supply of aunts and uncles. Nothing could have done more to convince us that the formidable Lady Waters will play a decisive role in the lives of the protagonists of To the North (1932) than the genealogical flourish with which she is introduced: ‘Lady Waters had had no children by either marriage. Her first had ...”

“... in posies for readers to sniff and to pluck. Consider this delicious morsel of anonymity, ‘On a Lady Sleeping’, plucked by Peter Davidson from BL MS Add. 25,707: Calmely as the mornings soft teares shedd Upon some rose or Violet bedd May your slumbers fall upon you All your thoughts sit easy on you Gently rocking heart and eyes With their tuneful ...”

“... thirteenth century. This puts a new complexion on the fairy: not the misty bath-look of a country lady mysteriously slim, but the pale brown of a mysteriously plump, veiled woman of Damascus, in perpetual afternoon sewing, secluded from the dusty city. We wonder how her needlework found its way to this wall. In the coarse hands of some crusader? Did he come ...”

“... this seriously. I am always taking it seriously out to the wheelie bin and dropping in the white lady in the grey underhose who as we speak is speeding southwards in a sealed railway compartment. Perhaps that is poetry? No, it’s love. Can you recall why you began to write? I was locked in a toilet with a jackdaw and a notebook and my mother was pounding on ...”

“... says, the old Ascendancy in Ireland. Elsewhere Yeats borrows a phrase from the poem to talk about Lady Gregory, who is said to be ‘indifferent to praise or blame’, a quality attributed to the law that was one of the pretty toys ‘we’ had when young. But then their youth in this sense goes back a while, at least to the 18th century, as Foster ...”