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“... available to her ambition is the role of fortune-hunter and knight-errant (she hankers to be ‘Lady Errant’), the mobility that even in romance is reserved for men alone. As she herself concedes when fiercely denying she ‘was seen in man’s apparel ... in designe to do mischief’, she has attempted an impossible crossing of boundaries. McKeon ...”

“... from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who welcomed Strachey, ‘would no more have invited Carrington than the cook’. Knowing her very well, he thought she was a complex and original character in a strange situation, but did not say what effect on her the strange situation had. Dora ...”

“... Henry Ash in a copy of one of Ash’s books in the London Library. The letters address an unknown lady; they are suggestive of intellectual, and perhaps other kinds of passion; and Roland, from motives obscure to himself but none the less compelling, steals them. He does not tell Blackadder; he does not tell Val, the woman with whom he damply and gloomily ...”

“... stunning girl with the blonde halo? Can it be possible she is still alive? So the lovely, fat old lady, resurrected, becomes a staple of film festivals. She is in a position of absolute security. Fame has come too late to bewilder or corrupt; it can only console. She is something better than a star. She is an eternal flame in the holy church of cinema. Brooks ...”

“... episode that almost everyone would consider as in itself sexist, the trick Panurge plays upon the Lady of Paris who refuses his advances? He sprinkles her gown with ground-up pieces of genitals of a bitch in heat and then withdraws to watch the sport, as all the male dogs of Paris assemble to piss on her, head to toe ... Her offence, remember, is simply that ...”

“... of one who was, even then, engaged in a bitter law-suit with Jane Austen’s brother. Neither lady, perhaps, saw the other at her most amiable. If Honan were as devout an Anglican as Charles Austen, he might have made more sense of the ‘defensive congratulations’ that attended Charles’s marriage to his deceased wife’s sister. In 1820 such unions ...”

“... in that area: Rachel Stires was pleasant looking in a skinny, country nutty, windburned lollypop-lady son of way. She had her hair pulled back in a heavy ponytail, and wore velour track suits and plastic flower-shaped earrings of the kind people used to throw darts and shoot down ping-pong balls to win at travelling fairs. I brought bottles of Blue Nun to ...”

“... on the head. But whereas we used to let them grow up, allowing Liszt (if not Liberace) to become a lady-killer as well as a full-fledged artist, we no longer do. In fact, we see all men as infantile – all variations on a sitcom mentality (from Father Knows Best to Men Behaving Badly) that acknowledges feminist rage without questioning masculine privilege. We ...”

“... she had tackled Johnson at the ball following Kennedy’s inauguration. LBJ first told her that Lady Bird was worried about his health and that a quiet spell would suit them both. Mrs Luce (as she told the story) snorted in disbelief: ‘Lyndon, come clean.’ Lyndon leaned closer: ‘Clare darling, I looked it up. One out of every four Presidents has died ...”

“... journey into the darkness of the past. The details of Salisbury’s character, as given by Lady Gwendolen, match the scenes of Disraeli in his letters. Disraeli was not comfortable with nature, and especially not with horses; nor was Salisbury, who was eventually saved by the tricycle. Disraeli could see everything in a room, but nothing outside ...”

“... Cordelia’s terrifying power is at last cancelled through the intervention of a divinity, ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Help’, taking the shape of the Virgin Mary. Elaine at last comes to understand the nature of this deity, as she sees into the heart of Cordelia’s malice and is able to forgive. She is released. But Cat’s Eye is not a sentimental novel, nor ...”

“... service that suits their own needs. At these clinics, a nominal fee is charged in order to avoid a Lady Bountiful, charitable image of health care, and to call attention to the joint share of physicians and patients in the fashioning of a community-based system of social medicine. Community or regional health systems have been established in other ...”

“... in a particularly subversive act of cataloguing, Edith Holden’s Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady has been granted the same classmark as the biographies of Einstein and the memoirs of local Nobel Prize-winners from Rutherford to Mott. In Georgina Ferry’s account, the career of Dorothy Hodgkin (née Crowfoot) stands at first sight as a cheering contrast ...”

“... acquired a tendency to fall in love with every woman that I meet,’ he tells one unperturbed lady. The familiar Storeyan CV is reviewed as the ghosts crowd in. Fenchurch has dialogues with his miner father, who explains: ‘I’ve tried to save you from working on your belly eight hours of the day or night, with two hundred yards of rock above your ...”

“... The proceedings have moved towards their conclusion. The bearded poets and the grey-haired lady biographers have stamped their furry feet at the Minister for Rabbits, who has handled them firmly with his velveteen gloves. The genial Dickensian chairman is winding up the session in tones that tell us it’s all just a game but please do stay and join ...”