“... suffragette era (see, for example, Mellors’s denunciation of his first wife’s beaked vagina in Lady Chatterley’s Lover). However, comradely love would eschew penetration, being limited to the intimacies meticulously defined in the wrestling match between Birkin and Gerald. Lawrence further underlined this point by his portrait of degenerate Eros in the ...”

“... unofficial reports appear, ‘all absolve Samuel of any wrong-doing’; and the chapter ends with Lady Donaldson’s conclusion that Samuel ‘was free from all blame unless one attaches blame to loyalty’. The view that Asquith and Samuel saved the political careers of Lloyd George and Isaacs, with most fortunate results for Britain, is reinforced by the ...”

“... largely abandons differences between women for duplicity within: though her lively account of Lady Audley’s Secret and East Lynne does suggest ‘the doubleness at the heart of Victorian constructions of proper womanhood’, only the general impulse to deconstruct fictions of female sameness and identity appears to link this argument with the rest. An ...”

“... The most interesting moment of In Bed with Madonna shows the star before a mirror, her make-up lady hovering at her shoulder. Face white, blank, hair-piece cosied on her skull like the top of a cottage loaf, she waits for experience to be layered over the impersonation of innocence; she could, you think, become anything at all. Madonna says: ‘I will be a ...”

“... eye over Yeats and concluding him to be overworked, under-nourished and badly in need of a Lady Gregory, and looking back on Keats’s fatal illness with expressions of expert surprise not that he died so young but that he lived as long as he did, having clearly wrestled with ‘a phthisical laryngeal affliction for nearly two years before he first ...”

“... London’s now where what is cold Is terminal. This poem is also a political indictment: The lady was a liar Who blared from the unblurring screen Home truths of the Great British. If the remarkably crafted ‘Herrick shape’ of the poem invokes 17th-century lyric, its melding of direct attack, didacticism and concern calls to mind Augustan poetry ...”

“... thought that Roosevelt would take the United States into the coming war in Europe. (‘My dear lady,’ he replied to a woman at a party in 1944 who’d asked whether he favoured the President’s reelection, ‘if Hitler runs for President and Stalin for Vice-President, I shall be happy to vote for that ticket against Roosevelt.’) Although he did in ...”

“... Julian Critchley, one of the Whitbread judges, wrote an article in which he blamed the ‘Corps of Lady Novelists’ for her victory. The book, he said, ‘resembles the Life of Jackie Charlton as written by Beryl Bainbridge’. He clearly meant this as a huge insult – but to whom? Interviewers who had not had time to look at the book went to see Atkinson ...”

“... of people go misty-eyed at the romantic memories conjured by a few bars of Chris De Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’; it’s still a frightful song. What Marcus has put his finger on, if only his book didn’t end here, is that what looks like democracy is really only meretriciousness. People like Elvis because he gave them nothing to fear (though since his death ...”

“... here,’ she reports the King’s head wife as declaring; and whether or not this was what Lady Thieng said, it clearly represents Leonowens’s own view of the women’s condition. Ellen Moers long ago observed how 19th-century women writers adopted the rhetoric of abolitionism for the cause of their sex: it remains unclear whether Leonowens would ...”

“... resent, dislike and try to despise. It is characterisation as assassination, the portrait of a lady who’s already dead, or at least moribund. Poised on the stairs, she’s Lolita’s doomed mother, who is introduced in exactly the same setting, smoking the same cigarette, as ‘a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich’. Béa is a weak solution of Lauren ...”

“... did as she pleased, though she was ruthlessly hard to please. Moore became a cult figure, the old lady in the tricorne hat who threw the first pitch of the baseball season, went to prize fights with George Plimpton, dined with Cassius Clay, as he then was, and was hired, unavailingly, to give a name to a new Ford car. On the whole people think rather little ...”

“... chivalric fiction is binge-watching television. When he considers ‘the matter of wooing a great lady’, he says he naturally ponders ‘the classics’. Such as The Dating Game, ABC-TV, 1965. There are two storylines in Quichotte, located in different layers of fictional reality, although since Rushdie is so good at what we might call the profusion ...”

“... began her cursus with XEclogue (1993), a book of pastoral featuring the ‘roaring boys’, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Nancy the shepherdess, and ‘a pink prosthesis hidden in the forest’. Debbie: An Epic (1997), in which ‘Virgil’s Bastard Daughters Sing’, followed soon after. In 2001, she also published a book-length georgic poem, The ...”

“... 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 ...”