“... effect’, and in doing so reinforces an overall sense of necessity. The Portrait of a Lady tells us that Ralph Touchett accompanies Henrietta Stackpole to look at the pictures in the long gallery of his father’s country house the day after they have been boating together, but we know that it could have been three days later, or five. The time is ...”

“... which we have jettisoned, but the 1950s still possessed. My favourite is the Emasculating Lady Psychologist – a cross between Hannah Arendt and the Wicked Witch of the West – who heads the firm’s research department, appears in the first episode and then, alas, isn’t invited back to exhibit her horribly fake German accent until Episode ...”

“... step was the publication in the Illustrated London News on 24 February of an engraving of the ‘Lady with the Lamp’. In early May she visited Balaclava and was received by cheering soldiers. On 13 May she collapsed and was laid low with fever. Her case was said to be as bad as any; recovery took weeks. What caused her illness? Bostridge is too ...”

“... mechanisms of elite influence retained their power. It was Fielding’s well-connected cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who engineered his youthful entrée into the theatre world; she was the dedicatee of his first play, and the driving force behind his burlesque of the Dunciad, which survives only in manuscript draft. (It may be that this particular ...”

“... when the Catholic community of Tollington Park in London, following ‘a campaign of prayer to Our Lady’, exchanged their small church (capacity 140) and £35,000 for the larger Congregationalist church (capacity 1300) across the road. Reading Delaney, it’s hard not to think of the Poles in contemporary Britain. The same anxiety about poor housing, wage ...”

“... or else by accident. But ‘appeal to accident’ isn’t a mode of explanation. Luck isn’t a lady, tonight or any other night – nor a blind force either. If I ask you how you holed the ball in one and you reply ‘Sheer luck,’ you haven’t offered me an explanation: you’ve ruled out one particular explanation by indicating that it wasn’t because ...”

“... was published anonymously. With becoming modesty, Sense and Sensibility was advertised as ‘By a Lady’, a common enough ascription at the time. None of Austen’s other novels bore her name during her lifetime. Walter Scott published his ‘Waverley’ novels (the most popular novels Britain had ever seen) without owning up to being their author for many ...”

“... lords took the opportunity to spell it out. Bogdanor cites the storm warnings given by Lord Steyn, Lady Hale and Lord Hope. Hope, one of the Scottish law lords, said: ‘Parliamentary sovereignty is no longer, if it ever was, absolute … Step by step, gradually but surely, the English principle of the absolute legislative sovereignty of Parliament … is ...”

“... a certain institutional comedy of shame was set in plaster. Freud didn’t get a look in, but Our Lady did, and we all lived as if the turmoil of life was ordained by higher beings. Priests were sometimes engaged to preside over pledges and to maintain the status quo in a bad marriage, but I found it hard – even harder, I think, than my brothers did – to ...”

“... unpunished, becoming a viscount and marrying the young Brontës’ favourite imaginary noblewoman, Lady Zenobia. Like Charlotte, Branwell manages to have it both ways, but only because his fiction is incapable of taking itself seriously. As child writers, the difference between Branwell and his sisters is that the sisters simply needed to persist, whereas ...”

“... you my life is a success?’ Death answers, Yes. Well, yes. Certainly we’re a long way from Lady Lazarus and the art of dying exceptionally well. Frost’s studies of lonely women in poems like ‘The Hill Wife’ or ‘A Servant to Servants’ are undoubtedly the poetic progenitors of Jarrell’s gallery of unhappy women, whose plight might be summed ...”

“... a range of small kindnesses, like the two Islington wives who got ‘a pipkyn of pottage’ from Lady Taylbushe and some alms from local notables, but still had to send their children to ‘good houses, to aske a mese of pottage or such other victualls’. Nobody would give credit to someone ‘on the parish’, so they could never get off it; charity was a ...”

“... or so, after which the king had her stuffed. Exotic beasts didn’t always find such favour. When Lady Lisle gave Anne Boleyn a monkey in 1534, she wasn’t pleased. ‘As to touching your monkey,’ John Hussee wrote to Lisle the following year, ‘of a truth, madam, the queen loveth no such beasts nor can scarce abide the sight of them.’ What happened to ...”

“... the time, in every way a man can miss his wife.’ It’s quite handy for the novel that the first lady is dead, since it makes it marginally easier for the president to go missing (it might have been difficult to give his wife the slip), and emphasises his heroism; it’s also convenient for his executive grip on the narrative that she isn’t around to ...”

“... know we are watching. Written in an unknown hand on an early, c.1484 black chalk drawing of a Lady Carrying a Hawk is the note: ‘This is also old. Albrecht Dürer did it for me, before he entered Wolgemut’s house to become a painter, up in the top attic of the back quarters of the house, in the presence of the late Konrad ...”