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“... state and its actors are mostly absent, replaced by charlatans and frauds who will fleece an old lady for all she’s worth. Alarmingly, many of her rogues have a history of work in care homes or hospitals. Her writing has been compared to that of Muriel Spark, Anita Brookner and Dahl, on the grounds that her approach to cruelty is placid, even-toned. It can ...”

“... Polish guys, but they said they already had enough and had a long way to walk home. An old black lady in a claret hat came round and picked up items here and there. ‘Very good here,’ she said. ‘Terrible to waste things just like this.’ ‘This is England now,’ I said to Alf, his face lighted somewhat ghoulishly under the lamp on his ...”

“... landlady, landlady’s daughter, hero, hero’s friend, jealous rival or enemy, vicar, elderly lady or aunt, practical joker (the influence of Kipling here), comedy foreigner, censorious neighbour, returning husband or foreigner, mysterious lodger. All, of course, were interchangeable, ready both to act and to be acted upon. Many years later, when I heard ...”

“... horsewhipped him and divorced her with poker-faced disdain and aplomb. He then married another lady of entirely chaste demeanour, with whom and with which he lived in placid self-satisfaction ever afterwards, although they had rather a tiresome time during the German invasion of 1940 and had to retire (for good, as it turned out) to Rhodesia. And oh yes, I ...”

“... going to say I had squandered spring when summer came along and took it from me like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine. But here it is winter, and wrong to speak of other seasons as though they exist. Time only has an agenda in that wallet at his back, while we who think we ...”

“... is thanks to some close contact with the wizardly spice, or some secret teaching by his mother, Lady Jessica, played by Rebecca Ferguson. Both films are driven by a benign Oedipal romance. The father dies and the son gets to hang out with his mum, but there is no aggression or lust.Jessica belongs to a sisterhood called the Bene Gesserit, whose members have ...”

“... hyper for Evelyn to encounter her daughter as the evil queen of the multiverse, dressed like Lady Gaga and bent on the destruction of all forms of life, but it is still continuous with the existing problem: Evelyn can’t listen to Joy, and she can’t change her. The same goes for Joy’s own embrace of nothing: extreme, but what else is she to believe ...”

“... an outdoor show called ‘Star Lasso’, desert and mountains behind him. The audience includes a lady with a veil, to whom Ricky makes a special salute. She was an actress as a child, the only other survivor of the chimpanzee attack. A flicker of wind on the veil allows us to see her disfigured face. She might well be a reminder that aliens can be close to ...”

“... a form of bolero. It’s pleasant and sad, not at all threatening. In the film, an old lady keeps asking Seo-rae to play it for her. It is about getting lost in the ...”

“... resolves spontaneously – is the facial scarring caused by its pocks, of the kind that affected Lady Mary Wortley Montagu after her recovery from smallpox in 1715. The likelihood of finding how the virus got out of Africa is low, and it is too early to tell whether the current outbreak will fizzle out or linger in the MSM network. It is a manifestation of ...”

“... Only one brand of handmade cigarette (Morland, three gold bands), one bath essence for visiting lady friends (Floris), one food for dinner (scrambled eggs fines herbes), one newspaper (the Times – ‘the only paper Bond ever read’), even a brand of little pots of jam. Far from being a merciless killer, at times Bond’s hands seem to flap around in a ...”

“... offices in the place Beauvau. (The dream outcome for Washington would have been an old-lady-and-the-fly sequence: the rabbit is swallowed by the dog, the dog is swallowed by Sarkozy and finally the would-be president is swallowed by the senior emissary of the United States – and France lives happily ever after in the belly of the beast.) Three ...”

“... the second Orson Welles. She is the urban exception in the wild country, the elaborately dressed lady with the fancy hairdo who knows more about life than any of the cowboys or prospectors. She is indispensable, if not to the West then certainly to the Western: the fashionable floozy, the woman with a past. But she is also, and it’s hard to think of ...”

“... further still. In Aurora Leigh, ‘that bilious Grimwald’ (a critic) observes the villainous Lady Waldemar:Those alabaster shoulders and bare breasts,On which the pearls drowned out of sight in milkWere lost excepting for the ruby clasp!They split the amaranth velvet-bodice downTo the waist or nearly.Grimwald gives a ‘a low carnivorous laugh’, and ...”

“... the matter up again, when it was all so definitively done and dusted by our very English Iron Lady, who to make things all the more poignant (or aggravating) is now just a shadow of her former self. So too is the British Empire, which persists, against all the evidence, in reimagining itself ruling the waves and capable of decently governing even its ...”