“... 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 ...”

“... or married man to have a secret super-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady seems to me to be deliberate infidelity.’ He decides that she will have to read everything he writes; no more secrets. She, though, is keeping a secret from him. To ‘prevent mutual recriminations in the future’, she agrees to see his doctor. But what ...”

“... mayor Fran Reiter admits, ‘you know as well as I do that if some homeless person, some bag lady, walks into Tiffany’s, they are not going to let her use the toilet.’ Often, you will have to spend money in a place before the staff will give you the code or a key: ‘These toilets are for customer use only.’ Shopping centres tend to signpost their ...”

“... is thrilling but dangerous. Carney avoids places with frequent reports of muggings (‘an old lady carrying groceries hit on the head’) and keeps instead to the well-lit Riverside Drive, one of Harlem’s few affluent residential streets. He has an almost naive faith in the American Dream: ‘You came from one place but more important was where you ...”

“... carried a weapon wherever he went, even on holiday: he used a hammer on a man trying to do an old lady out of her pennies in an arcade. They weren’t much older when they were shown, by their grinning father, their paternal grandfather’s dead body in its open casket. And they were still young – ‘all scared like little white rabbits’ – when they ...”

“... facelessness; her photographs, which show figures blurred by movement, could be one. ‘Lady with a Book’ (1946) Of the exhibition’s omissions, the saddest to my mind is Lady with a Book, from 1946, not least because it upsets notions about her artistic decline. In some respects, it’s a conventional ...”

“... in writing songs, and telling stories, about how great it is to be a young, hot, dollar-savvy lady-adventurer, there is still nothing about being an older, stoic, domestic hero, quietly mending and re-mending the world, every day.(Add Middlemarch to Moran’s reading list, fuck it, to everyone’s reading list.) It is astonishing to me, and even ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... capitalism or the Olympics?Last night Allaround and her team defeated a super-strong bank-robbing lady called Bludgeon. More important – in Allaround’s eyes – she asked her teammate Magefist to prom. Magefist is an awkward, recently transitioned trans girl. She gets her own superpowers from a magical gauntlet that lets her control a floating extra ...”