“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Spanish flu in her journal, slipping it in as a joke between Lytton Strachey’s sore finger and Lady Murray’s invitation to lunch, when the death rate in parts of London was higher than it had been in the trenches and people who had been well at breakfast were dead by bedtime and deadly as plutonium to everyone who saw them in between, but I think I ...”

“... sense of this connection, but perhaps sense isn’t what she needs. It’s worth noting that the lady who told the original story comes to think that accepting that ‘contradictory ideas’ can both be true is a sign of ‘starting to grow up’.Mr Wilder and Me brings these perspectives together in interesting ways. The frame story is told by Calista, a ...”

“... little attention in Handley’s account. And they read: aloud or silently, by moon or candlelight. Lady Anne Clifford had devout material read to her in bed by her servants, who noted down ‘things new and old, Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors’ on small pieces of paper which were then pinned around her bedstead ...”

“... giving a compelling account of the Burgundian and French contexts in which Anne was raised to be a lady of the court. Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, described Anne at the age of thirteen as ‘so bright and pleasant for her young age’. Margaret’s court was full of art and literature: she owned tapestries, sculptures, paintings (including ...”

“... and Roussel (‘Ginger’) de Bailleul. Roussel – the hero of Duggan’s Lady for Ransom – took part in the Byzantine campaign of 1071 against the invading Turks, which ended in disastrous defeat at Manzikert, but got away with his men and used the collapse of Byzantine power to set up an independent kingdom in what is now ...”

“... up and threw her violently to the floor, causing her permanent damage. He regarded feminism as ‘lady-nonsense’ and was in favour of polygamy. His mother told him that he was irritating, overbearing and insignificant, which makes you wonder what his enemies thought of him. He was also a full-blown irrationalist, for whom reason was merely a blunt ...”

“... as an appendix.Slowly she transmuted herself into an unstable compound of rakishly hospitable Lady Bountiful in the country (Picasso’s visit was a great success, as he seemed to enliven the whole farm and environs; Miller herself never blended with the local pastimes and persons, never took walks except to the nearby pub) and dignified Mrs Ronald ...”

“... In​  The Portrait of a Lady, Mrs Touchett describes finding Isabel Archer ‘sitting in a dreary room on a rainy day, reading a heavy book and boring herself to death’. She adds, defending herself, ‘You may say I shouldn’t have enlightened her – I should have let her alone. There’s a good deal in that, but I acted conscientiously; I thought she was meant for something better ...”