“... An examination of what must have been Titian’s first major commission, the landscape with ‘Our Lady going into Egypt’, neglected by most modern accounts of Titian (it emerged from a long process of restoration in the Hermitage and was exhibited at the National Gallery shortly before this book was printed), makes the argument all the more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but also to show off. Her agent remembered Wilder’s drafts as the narration of a ‘fine old lady … sitting in a rocking chair and telling a story chronologically but with no benefit of perspective or theatre’ until Lane intervened, adding dialogue, cutting and rearranging scenes, getting rid of characters or turning them into composites. To add ...”

“... Henry VIII had used it to justify his deeply self-righteous claim that he had never married a lady called Katherine of Aragon, and that God was very angry with him, both for having mistakenly thought that he had done so, and for allowing the pope to provide a dispensation for the marriage to take place, against ius divinum. Non-residence was thus fatally ...”

“... this time in full-on mystic maniac mode – to take part in a séance in Atlantic City, at which Lady Doyle attempted to summon Houdini’s mother. Through Doyle, Cecilia spoke, with the faint, ethereal diction of a spirit: ‘Thank you, with all my heart for this … My only shadow has been that my beloved one hasn’t known how often I’ve been with ...”

“... des Arts et Métiers in Paris, he writes, ‘there was one curious device’: The figure of a lady less than a foot high and wearing a gorgeous dress was seated on a piano stool in an attractive pose. When a key was wound, she glanced gently to left and right and her hands struck the keys lightly to produce a melody. She looked so lifelike to us as we ...”

“... gowns’), he met not only Castro but the ‘strong, vital, buoyant’ Che Guevara and ‘a lady with a sad, beautiful face’, whom he and Nowell recognised as Dolores Ibárruri, better known as La Pasionaria. He was among his own people, big people. His admiration for Communism was inseparable from his worship of power. Not for nothing was The ...”

“... was published anonymously. With becoming modesty, Sense and Sensibility was advertised as ‘By a Lady’, a common enough ascription at the time. None of Austen’s other novels bore her name during her lifetime. Walter Scott published his ‘Waverley’ novels (the most popular novels Britain had ever seen) without owning up to being their author for many ...”

“... and convert to Christianity), and is rescued from despair when he fathers the child of a ‘loving lady chimpanzee’: ‘In sum, a worthy primate evolution demanded, besides a few macroevolutionary lucky breaks, a basis of brainpower; and commencing with a combination of man-chimp child, the two most intelligent of God’s creatures might produce this new ...”

“... effect’, and in doing so reinforces an overall sense of necessity. The Portrait of a Lady tells us that Ralph Touchett accompanies Henrietta Stackpole to look at the pictures in the long gallery of his father’s country house the day after they have been boating together, but we know that it could have been three days later, or five. The time is ...”

“... when the Catholic community of Tollington Park in London, following ‘a campaign of prayer to Our Lady’, exchanged their small church (capacity 140) and £35,000 for the larger Congregationalist church (capacity 1300) across the road. Reading Delaney, it’s hard not to think of the Poles in contemporary Britain. The same anxiety about poor housing, wage ...”

“... which we have jettisoned, but the 1950s still possessed. My favourite is the Emasculating Lady Psychologist – a cross between Hannah Arendt and the Wicked Witch of the West – who heads the firm’s research department, appears in the first episode and then, alas, isn’t invited back to exhibit her horribly fake German accent until Episode ...”

“... or else by accident. But ‘appeal to accident’ isn’t a mode of explanation. Luck isn’t a lady, tonight or any other night – nor a blind force either. If I ask you how you holed the ball in one and you reply ‘Sheer luck,’ you haven’t offered me an explanation: you’ve ruled out one particular explanation by indicating that it wasn’t because ...”

“... and Valentino, staying together at San Francisco’s St Francis Hotel while filming Moran of the Lady Letty, enjoyed a brisk and bacchic itinerary: After shooting outdoors from seven in the morning until seven at night, they’d bathe, put on bathrobes, and order dinner in. Then they’d sleep a few hours, setting the alarm for midnight. After they got up ...”