“... freed from the tiresome necessity of ever doing any real work. Amanda Cross’s Kate Fansler is a lady of private means and an English professor at Columbia to boot, so that is her excuse for living the life of Reilly. But both Wilson and Dunant’s heroines are unattached bohemians who have the street-credible attitudes of the poor, while appearing to live ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... impact on the future. The great Maastricht debate was mainly prosecuted by politicians who, from Lady Thatcher downwards, believed it was the moment to fix a Maginot line beyond which the previous momentum for integration would not pass. The terms of the argument they made therefore tended to be inward-looking and, above all, anachronistic. They worried more ...”

“... He said the boy wouldn’t have much to do in the way of work, just be a companion for the old lady. It would mean one less mouth to feed, Grandma explained. So, aged eight, Bert was sent off to work. From daylight to dark, he was kept busy feeding the pigs and fowls, minding the sheep, milking the cows. Paid nothing but his keep, his clothes turning to ...”

“... destroyers. So, we have Lily, twice widowed in Vietnam (a misfortune that seems to call for a Lady Bracknell to comment on it), finding solace in thoughts of Ancient Egypt and the cult of Isis, and finally making it to Cairo on her third – reluctant – honeymoon. ‘Third Time Lucky’ is the ironic title. In ‘People to People’ a group of ...”

“... poet, Shakespeare or Racine, in Magnus Merriman, for example, or the mockheroic battle between Lady Lysistrata’s female warriors and the British Army in The Impregnable Women, or the farcical sequence in the dark at a Hollywood party where Juan proposes in quick succession, inadvertently each time, to a pair of identical extras called Jill and ...”

“... monologue ‘in the manner of Browning’, according to the author’s wife and biographer Lady Ferguson, which imagines the musings and misgivings of an Invincible recruit and participant in the Phoenix Park murders of 1882. From this point, we come up pretty swiftly to the modern age, via Yeats, Synge, Francis Ledwidge, Padraig Colum and one or two ...”

“... of Arab horsemen defeating Persians at the battle of Al-Qadissiya (AD 637). It is in the style of Lady Butler painting British cavalry engagements in the last century. This painting forms the outer circle: the inner circle is of sand, realistically strewn with ancient armour, the helmets and weapons of the fallen. The greenjackets wanted to remind us that ...”

“... no poem issues from that sentiment, though he resorts to Venice, Vienna, Berlin, Lisbon and even Lady Gregory’s Coole Park to provoke it. Traipsing around Germany after the war, he consigned to his notebook the hope that ‘old Europe’ wouldn’t be let die. Many of his poems are in praise of continuity: For continuity, A place of your own Where ...”

“... manqué.) The odd woman out during Carlyle’s frequent absences in the flattering society of Lady Ashburton and her aristocratic circle, Jane actually contemplated leaving him in the mid-Forties, a drastic step – for the time – from which she was dissuaded only by the advice of their friend Mazzini. Where Kaplan is content to describe, Phyllis Rose ...”

“... disparate episodes: an anonymous phone call in New York, bizarre conjunctions, an affair with Lady Q., a bit of bohemian life in London – ‘In Francis Bacon’s queer after-hours club’ – and one Pericles Belleville. At a very formal dinner party, At which I met the woman I have loved the most In my life, Belleville Pulled out a sterling ...”