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“... know, to be a ploy: Gawain is being tested and it’s just as well that he is able to resist the lady’s bright features because the Court’s honour depends on it. Nonetheless, it wasn’t long before, as Malory has it, Camelot was undone by Lancelot’s passion for Guinevere. It is an Augustinian view of the world that represents men as unable to turn a ...”

“... were aborted so soon: the Twins were active members of the Bethnal Green Conservative Association. Lady Mancroft, president of the Association at that time, recalls ‘a frightful row ... they attacked someone, threw him across the road through a shop window. The police were very close and the hospital managed to sew the chap’s ear back on.’ Geoffrey ...”

“... Past Times, The World of Interiors, Merchant-Ivory films, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady or the trade in architectural antiques. What distinguishes Samuel from other, more censorious critics of contemporary culture is his relative indulgence towards such frivolities. He has inflamed some of his socialist colleagues by justifying the popular ...”

“... waste the next morning watching This Morning again. The two women who have upstaged me are called Lady Ironside and Mrs Patch. Lady Ironside, who wore a scarlet jacket similar to the one I might have worn, said that as a result of radiotherapy she was in severe and constant pain, her collar-bone was dead, her ribs fractured ...”

“... of an architect of uncertain social origins and a German name perhaps strengthened her resolve. (Lady Edith soon became close to her son-in-law, who designed her a wonderful house, Homewood, on the Knebworth estate.) From the start, Emily was an outsider in her own home; when she was Lutyens’s fiancée, she began to sew their entwined initials on the bed ...”

“... In twenty years,’ Lady Astor used to say of Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, ‘I’ve never known Philip to be wrong on foreign politics.’ Though Lothian himself thought much the same, it is, in fact, harder to think of an occasion when he was right. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the strongly anti-Nazi head of the Foreign Office in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an incurably superficial Johnny-Know-All ...”

“... control the rate of inflation. Indeed, they hold the second of these much more strongly than the Lady herself did, while the first only encourages the worst habits of British businessmen. How long this historically bizarre policy can be followed is anyone’s guess. Much depends, presumably, on how easily we can continue to fund the huge current account ...”

“... an illegitimate child, excruciatingly humiliating in her day. Virginia Woolf, another sharp-eyed lady, wrote that all West’s difficulty came from ‘the weals and scars left by the hoofmarks of Wells’. (She also had comments about dirty nails and so on; Rebecca, for her part, would not ‘have fed a dog’ from one of Vanessa Bell’s plates, and ...”

“... is true, that history actually follows fashion. ‘Lucille’, the nom de salon of the couturière Lady Duff Gordon, was convinced that the short skirts and clean, liberated lines of interwar styles were entirely a product of the fashion houses’ need to economise. ‘Critics wrote learnedly of the “modern girl’s emancipation”,’ she noted ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”