“... 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 ...”

“... spread about a marriage that would have made Winifred in fact what she was in effect, the First Lady of Nazism; even members of the Führer’s circle, even his secretary, thought the couple were having an affair, gossiping about Hitler’s ‘Bayreuth Treatment’ – a view Hamann dismisses out of hand. Whether consummated or not, the relationship was ...”

“... and each line contains the name of a flower, a tree, a fruit, a reference to game, a famous old lady and the word ‘bathtub’: ‘In the apple tree Queen Mary of the Chrysanthemums shared a grape rook bathtub with her insect lamp.’ In a simpler form, this approach worked well with groups of children. In Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to ...”

“... be normal and give a man a level playing-field, a fair break. He was like a gambler convinced that lady luck will be on his side, depending on a profound misunderstanding of the nature of probability. Crane calls his planning ‘brinkmanship’. Scott blamed ‘Providence’, a curious Edwardian compromise between a Victorian God who manages the affairs of men ...”

“... thanks to her cruel parents, a key character’s sister in The Priest of Evil is an alcoholic bag lady who ‘won’t live much longer’. Jo Nesbø’s The Redbreast bucks the trend – but only because it adheres too rigidly to other Scandinavian thriller conventions. Nesbø’s hero, Harry Hole, is an off-the-peg maverick detective whose alcoholism and ...”

“... I Have Known, All Souls in My Time and so on; not to mention his fixation on the Dark Lady). No such luck. Ollard is a careful biographer and does his best with the early years (when Rowse was an unsuccessful Labour Party candidate in Cornwall, struggling with illness and writing imaginative local history). But it is only the elderly Rowse who ...”

“... Heaney would, I suppose, approve of the angelic turn that Watkins’s verse was to take. In The Lady with the Unicorn (1948) there is an efflorescence of Neo-Platonism and a rather gnostic form of Christianity. The emerging poetic now refines and examines symbols in order to explore elevated states rather than compounding them, the better to inter the poet ...”

“... the lives of a curate, a Nonconformist headmaster, a stonemason, a nurse, a middle-class ‘young lady’ and so on. It is like being set down in the crowd in one of Frith’s paintings and being able to hear the conversations. The diaries are full of interest and surprise but they are smothered by the editing and design of the book, which give a new boost to ...”

“... unsatisfactory about the way it sounds; perhaps my difficulty with it has something to do with Lady Archer. There are names within the novel, too, that Lanchester seems to have not quite worked out what to do with: it would be fine to give London’s newspapers aliases such as the Toxic, the Serious and the Sentinel, and it isn’t a bad joke, only it ...”

“... the collision between tradition and modernity, which was evident enough in the nation of Yeats and Lady Gregory. It is typically the work of literal or internal émigrés, men and women caught on the hop between different cultures and languages. If literary modernism is the point at which language comes to be about language, taking itself as the object of its ...”

“... of reform’ and may have been implicated (with other members of his family) in support for Lady Jane Grey and in Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary of 1553-54: perhaps this was one of the reasons he fled England shortly afterwards. No less formative was the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, when thousands of Protestants were slaughtered by ...”