“... the man who wrote to the motoring press urging drivers not to stop after an accident if they had a lady on board was Bernard Shaw. Speed worship began to infect hard-headed urban councils, as one town after another (and not just in Britain) began holding Grand Prix round-the-houses races, or even round-the-houses-and-into-the-trees races. And what sort of ...”

“... a trainee physiotherapist, a renowned doctor who had crossed the Atlantic on a raft, a socialist lady senator, a saxophonist etc. So we prepared for Greene’s visit as usual, although we forgot to put a coathanger in his room (cassocks are not supposed to be hung on coathangers), which apparently embarrassed him. When Greene arrived nobody asked any ...”

“... ironic explorations of narrative omniscience and deflected truth-seeking is uncomfortable. ‘Our Lady of Paris’, one of the two long stories woven from more contemporary material – wealthy sophisticated Pakistanis, educated in America, connoisseurs of old Europe – is full of good things but doesn’t quite bite: partly because it’s set in a France ...”

“... the state claim millions of adherents. More than a million people have visited the shrine of the Lady of the Realm, Ba Chua Xu, in southern Vietnam every year since the early 1990s: religion seems to offer the solace that the state can no longer provide, given the economic, social and cultural dislocations of the market economy. Buddhist monks in Hue ...”

“... began to take their own lives in droves towards the middle of the 18th century – in 1759 Lady Montagu called it a ‘fashion’ – but this striking development certainly wasn’t caused by a lack of social integration, or by what George Cheyne, in a bestselling book of 1733, diagnosed as The English Malady, a melancholy he attributed to the effects ...”

“... Present in the Muppet Christmas Carol. His friend Mary Gaskell was sent drawings of ‘The Fat Lady’, who in her black dress resembles a monumental tadpole, wriggling on a sofa or wallowing in a hammock. But his talent for line is also evident across the paintings: in the thorny branches that weave tortuously through the Briar Rose series, or loop the ...”

“... One Sunday​ in October 2017, a crowd gathered outside Our Lady, Queen of Polish Martyrs church, in the eastern Warsaw neighbourhood of Grochów. They were there to see the unveiling of a commemorative plaque: ‘In Memory of the 200,000 Poles Murdered in Warsaw in the German Death Camp KL Warschau.’ Flanked by two soldiers, the plaque was sprinkled with holy water by a priest and then saluted by an army officer, who laid a wreath ...”

“... small sloping eyes.’ Where there is humour, it’s often very dark. Black tells of an old lady murdered for her pension by her carer, who turned herself in to the police twenty years later. She told them where to find the torso and limbs, but confessed she’d kept the head wrapped in plastic in her potting shed. ‘Most cases end up with a ...”

“... by an indigenous mother) and ‘quenching the thirst of the bourgeoisie’ (represented by a pious lady).In Mexico City, everywhere is a place where water used to be. Almost nothing remains of the five lakes the original city was built on, although the memory of water is there in the names of the streets and the highways that were once canals. Twenty-two ...”

“... unfailing wit and laconic accuracy: ‘The ground in front of the Metropole was being dug up by lady road-menders,’ and the like. Equally intrusive are a number of gnomic remarks, by no means as lucid as Mrs Fitzgerald’s obiter dicta, though no less confident: ‘love depended on the ability to like oneself and required an understanding of eternal ...”

“... for his wife and any children.On Æthelred’s death in 911, his wife Æthelflæd became ‘the Lady of the Mercians’, as Adams puts it, and the last independent ruler of Mercia. With her brother, King Edward of Wessex, she co-ordinated a campaign to reconquer Danish Mercia, and Edward’s son Æthelstan (called ‘the Victorious’ by the Vikings) at ...”

“... 28: she has read a few advanced books and ‘has unjustly acquired a reputation for being a young lady with ideas’, declares Yourcenar. The author follows their engagement trip and honeymoon travels, through Central Europe, Italy and France, with an almost envious enjoyment. She seems to want to be ‘a member of the wedding’. Yourcenar knew her father ...”

“... Romantic creativity than an inescapable chore. Goodman’s study is a cultural history of the ‘lady of letters’. From 1660, French cultural theorists drew a distinction between letters and other kinds of writing, linking the former to ladies of birth. ‘Whereas all writing had previously been considered primarily a male occupation, letter-writing now ...”

“... Monastery blazed in the name of St Francis, who had loved fire and sung hymns to it. Our Lady Street burned for Father and Son at once. Needless to say the Lumber Market, Coal Market and Haymarket burned to the ground. In Baker Street the ovens burned, and the bread and rolls with them. In Milk Pitcher Street the milk boiled over. Only the West ...”

“... published in 1989 and officially attributed to ‘Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe’ (see also Lady Sings the Blues by ‘Billie Holiday with William Duffy’). Depending on mood, ethnicity, ideology, drug of choice, an oral biography can strike the reader as an authentic reproduction of voice, in all its self-contradictory rhythm and curl – or ...”