“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... inflation. Templer and Duport, Mona and Quiggin, Mrs Erdleigh and Mr Deacon, General Conyers and Lady Molly, not to speak of Widmerpool or Stringham, speak in expressive voices that, even at the more exotic end of the spectrum, never strain belief; in more vernacular idiom, the exchanges between Albert, Billson and Bracey at Stonehurst have little in common ...”

“... a question on the Princesse de Clèves. I don’t know if you’ve often had cause to ask the lady at the inquiry desk’ – the guichetière – ‘what she thought of the Princesse de Clèves. Imaginez un peu le spéctacle.’ The remark went unnoticed at the time, but Sarkozy repeated it word for word in an ‘interview’ he gave to a freesheet in ...”

“... her father) and would be a coup de théâtre today. She discovered that Sarah Siddons had seen Lady Macbeth not as a bloodthirsty harridan but as ‘feminine … even fragile’, but that she hadn’t played her that way; Terry decided to do so, and thus premiered what became one of the prevailing late 20th-century readings of the role. Her voluminous ...”

“... need eyes to see the page and hands to turn it. Some lick their thumbs; others, like Sheridan’s Lady Slattern, ‘cherish their nails for the convenience of making marginal notes’. Some leave distracting, even disgusting residues. Andrew Lang wrote in 1905 about reading Ann Radcliffe: The thick double-columned volume in which I peruse the works ...”

“... pages with something. So Beauman gives a thorough report of the time when Taylor, almost an old lady, invited two friends to luncheon in 1969 and they came on the wrong day: Herman declared Elizabeth had got it wrong and then sent what must have been a forged carbon copy of his original acceptance card ‘proving’ they had been due a day later. But ...”

“... Surprisingly little has been written recently about birdwatching. For Mynott, the image of the old lady paying her sub to the RSPB, hanging out fat balls and talking to the robin in her back garden can’t do the subject justice. His book is dense with evidence of the penetration of birds into our lives and vice versa. It is interested in American sports team ...”

“... who had cooled to her books said they felt guilty putting her down: she was just such a good lady. The best thing about Spurling’s focus is that it allows her to glide over most of Buck’s books – about India, Russia, Germany, Korea, American sculptresses who can’t decide between perfection of the life or the work, mountaineers who find that ...”

“... scruple, the sheer vindictiveness of Amis’s grammatical sneer at his own character Doll – ‘Lady Luck, that day, smiled on we Pretorians’ – even though that again seems typical of the miniature, interstitial, finally inconsequential scale of the imagination on display. The book as a whole strikingly lacks the dimension of fear: it is far too breezy ...”

“... I shall call​ my memoirs ‘Fifty Years a Bag Lady’. That is what papyrologists do: they pick over the written rubbish of antiquity for items of interest. You can learn a lot about your neighbours from their dustbins, and the dustbins of the ancient Greeks bring out all my curiosities. What did the Greeks do about garlic breath? What names did they give their cows? Why did they prefer Euripides to Sophocles? Why did they throw away so many copies of Homer? The last question invites a reflective answer ...”

“... sensationalising of Gothic narrative, for she needed to preserve her standing as a decorous lady. Coleridge, whose poetry often has powerfully Gothic overtones, was equally disapproving – particularly when the second edition of The Monk identified Lewis as an MP. Observing that ‘the Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or ...”

“... family of Nazareth, cloud of most pleasant rain, and sweetest fountain of nobleness and virtue, lady and heir of the perpetual happiness and glory of the noble realm of England (whom all sorts seek unto and submit themselves). To Elizabeth I and her advisers, ruling over a small island on the edge of Western Europe, and attempting to make a fragile ...”