“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mayor of the city. Eventually, she entered the House of Lords as a life peer – calling herself Lady Trumpington – and Mrs Thatcher made her a minister in the Department of Health. And they all lived happily ever after, except for Barker, who had a stroke and died in the 1980s. She claims in the first paragraph of Chapter 1 that, ‘quite ...”

“... 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 ...”