“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... made there) and had come to feel some Remains-of-the-Day-like affection for one of his supporters, Lady Elizabeth Lindsay. Nothing came of it. She died of pneumonia early in 1937, and the Prof never loved again. Back on the committee, he seems to have behaved better, even being bracketed with Tizard in R.V. Jones’s account of the completion of the radar ...”

“... theme means that he avoids musicals that have almost nothing to say about America: My Fair Lady, The Lion King (which trumped the aggressively American Ragtime in both critical and financial success), Oliver! and almost all Sondheim’s early musicals, which attack the form without having any real American content. And as part of the same problem he ...”

“... La Mère Poulard’s omelette recipe in 1922 was satisfied, but modern taste suspects that the old lady was hiding ...”

“... underlying Wood’s conservatism reflects a society at odds with itself. Because she is a lady, Isabel has little to do; her idleness encourages the brooding that leads to the loss of her claims to a lady’s position. Older women are hostile to her, largely because she is admired by men, and miss no chance to ...”

“... plays a prominent role, he has siphoned off millions of dollars from these deals. The first lady, Susan Mubarak, heads around a hundred charities, some of which, the report alleges, are little more than fronts for money laundering: each charity might receive as much as $5 million a year, but the money isn’t properly accounted for. According to the ...”

“... for which she strives’ (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime). Bearded Lady meets Twinkling Satellite: it’s probably happening right now, in the corner of a bookstore recently opened near ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”