“... respectable writings of the day. ‘Made up your mind, lovebird? – Yes ... I’ll have the fat lady in pink, the one with the crinoline.’ This is prostitution without the usual 19th-century trappings of mystery and romance. Corbière himself was quite familiar with ‘l’amour à trente sous’; fat ladies in pink were the meagre solace of long ...”

“... Eggleby, ‘in a tone which had been thoroughly sterilised of even perfunctory regret’. And a Lady Caroline, bound for a play, threatens that if it contains any more brilliant conversation she will burst into tears. Those tedious country-house weekends, with the ever-present threat of the pianola and progressive halma played for milk chocolate, certainly ...”

“... bank. Nonetheless he is under Shakespeare’s spell. He falls for his sister’s lover, a Dark Lady called Petra, and is unwittingly trapped in a Shakespearean plot, a sort of Thirteenth Night, in which, pinned down by a beagle, he is seduced by Petra and so effectively conceives his sister’s child, while the sister apparently dies but doesn’t ...”

“... advantageous to his kingship. It also entailed acts unconventional in a saint. A high-born lady near Paris committed adultery and had her lover kill her husband: she was sentenced to death. Queen Margaret and other noble ladies, backed by mendicant friars, pleaded with Louis for her life. He stood firm, and the woman was burned alive. (Chivalry shunned ...”

“... Venus of Willendorf 13 BC to Monica Belucci in the Pirelli calendar, 1997); Venus Clothed (Auxerre Lady from Crete, seventh century BC, to Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, 1960); Adonis Nude (a sixth-century Greek statue to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, 1985); Adonis Clothed (2000 BC silver statuette from Aleppo to George Clooney, 2002); Portraits of Adonis ...”

“... isn’t. Al’s world is populated by beings who are immaterial, yet exist: such as the little old lady dressed in pink who appears in the attic, searching for her lost son and daughter, and vanishes again soon afterwards in terror, muttering distractedly about ‘an evil thing’ that has happened in the house. From the age of eight or nine Al has seen ...”

“... Caryl Phillips’s play The Shelter (1984) tells of ‘an elegant 18th-century West Country lady who finds herself marooned on a desert island with a slave whom she despises but is wholly reliant on’. David Dabydeen, whose 1987 book, Hogarth’s Blacks, was a study of ‘Images of Blacks in 18th-Century English Art’, based his novel A Harlot’s ...”

“... at the Greyhound bus station in Asheville, North Carolina. He’s behind a ‘rather wide old lady’ who was ‘blotting her slick forehead, looking around for someone she knew’. ‘The first thing he said, after our hug’ was that ‘he needed a coffee.’ (Perhaps Riley chose to write about love for all the opportunities for bathos it could ...”

“... showed its absurdities. In seven of his pictures a pug is shown as the accessory of a fashionable lady. A dog bred to have an appearance that limits its ability to breathe, itʼs an apt mascot for the social sphere Tissot depicted in his ...”

“... bread a sailing ship/A bunweed [ragwort] to a burly spear/And of a sedge a sword of war/A comely lady of a clout [cloth]/And be right busy thereabout.’ They played conkers, tennis and ran about with whirligigs, described in 1598 as ‘a piece of card or paper cut like a cross and with a pin put in at the end of a stick which, running against the wind, doth ...”

“... Society, with the idea that K should be groomed as the future Messiah. Mary’s mother, Lady Emily Lutyens, herself a disruptively keen Theosophist, took such an interest in the boys’ progress – academic, social and religious – that her children saw them every day. Mary was only three years old and can remember nothing before them, but she has ...”

“... notice, the keeper of the woman claimed by A.L. Rowse (after Fraser’s book came out) as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. The ballads collected by Walter Scott contain wonderful praise – together with much that is more wonderful – of reiver exploits, of their boldness. But Fraser is sharp with Scott’s worshipful view of his ancestors. Scott and his ...”

“... else, who infuriated the second Mrs Barker by getting a knighthood, thus making her rival a real lady. Holroyd’s attention to the patterns of Shaw’s sexual behaviour and its putative early causes may be inordinate. He likes to find reflections of them everywhere, and he naturally makes much of the story of Stella, the illness during which Shaw wooed ...”

“... are types and humours – figures like the genial Mine Host, the Old Salt, the Apple-Cheeked Old Lady At The Village Shop, the Country Squire, and a complete fairy story set of Princes, Queens, Princesses, Duchesses and Dukes. Larkin’s ‘sunny Prestatyn’ says as much about tourist-posters as the theme will bear: there is no further point in being glum ...”

“... a world which in My Son’s Story is kept at arm’s length. At the same time, the white lady who becomes involved in black politics through her concern for her domestic, and who finds herself giving sanctuary to an armed fugitive, is almost a stock character in South African fiction. The truly unconventional relationship in this novel is that ...”