“... to look.’ Elizabeth Sampson, hauled before the bishop of London, put it more succinctly: Our Lady of Willesden ‘was a brent ars Elfe’. But as bishops went hunting through parishes for heresy, they also found people who held the old ways disturbingly close, with a fervent belief in the power of ritual words. In 1520, Henry Lillyngstone was charged by ...”

“... like Girls to be glad about the stories that were possible in its wake: onscreen there is Fleabag, Lady Bird, Hacks, Sorry, Baby, Insecure, Shiva Baby; on the page there is Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani, Jia Tolentino; in music there is Charli XCX, Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski. A commercial vein was opened in which it’s OK to be a girl, to mess around with your ...”

“... his own successful elopement story in reverse, like a counterfactual thought experiment. A married lady sits by her window and catches the eye of the handsome Duke: ‘She looked at him, as one who awakes, – /The past was a sleep, and her life began.’ But no sooner has life begun than they have both started to find reasons to put it off for the time ...”

“... by Robert Sterling) for being married to Julie LaVerne (played by Ava Gardner), the leading lady in a riverboat revue who we learn has ‘negro blood’, he pricks her finger, sucks her blood and proclaims that he now has ‘negro blood’ too. In Mississippi, where the boat is docked, not only was interracial marriage a crime and, prima ...”

“... Banking. She became the ‘village elder’ for younger colleagues: ‘She could be kind of a fat lady with big hair and a bohemian, but she was trying to do the right thing for the right reasons,’ her boss admitted. Life in New York was cold, hard and expensive. Soon she fled back to Jakarta for a better paying job with the Indonesian State Ministry for ...”

“... house where I lived for nearly fifty years. Not a bit of it is the truth, with the filming of The Lady in the Van two years ago more the real conclusion. Now the house looks much as it did when I first saw it in 1968, though then there were perches for parrots in the garden and one in the bay window, with upstairs gas meters in every room as during the war it ...”

“... Duc d’Alençon, and whose characteristic style of dress was about as plain and godly as that of Lady Gaga. It is equally odd, as Margaret Tudeau-Clayton’s splendid new book meticulously points out, that another is still William Shakespeare.The truth is that, for all the enthusiastic assertions of Major Longden and his ilk, Shakespeare has always been ...”

“... saying: ‘Come along, mother, I’ll take you upstairs.’ On the way out of the room the old lady passes an open piano on which (this is the stroke of genius) she suddenly hits a petulant discord. It lasts all of a minute and is worth a dozen pages of dialogue. Why it’s advertising ice cream I’m not sure. 26 September. A call from Channel 4 wanting ...”

“... the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems – ‘Daddy’, ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘The Applicant’, ‘Fever 103°’ – were ‘beautifully’ read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerising cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been ...”

“... Not often, indeed, had Jean Marie Latour come so near to the Fountain of all Pity as in the Lady Chapel that night; the pity that no man born of woman could ever utterly cut himself off from; that was for the murderer on the scaffold, as it was for the dying soldier or the martyr on the rack. The beautiful concept of Mary pierced the priest’s heart ...”

“... Henry James writes of a very grand lady that she had ‘an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias Canetti. Behind its approachable modesty, its avoidance of every publicity and image-making process, there is a loftiness, an assurance, a stance of absolute superiority ...”

“... But even now, at some level, I couldn’t accept it: that this courteous and sharp-witted lady was the one who had been, rather reluctantly, photographed with Neal Cassady, and who had herself been responsible for some of the most familiar images of Kerouac and Cassady in archetypal buddy-buddy poses. I guess that I’m temperamentally ill-equipped to ...”

“... occasion of my mother’s telling), she screamed at the doctors who informed her that when a young lady gets a bad headache the reason is that she’s been thinking too hard, and they ejected her (despite her screaming) from the emergency room into a thunderstorm. I like to think that if I am in line for a brain fever I shall be better prepared than my mother ...”

“... about it. In the UK press’s coverage of the public mood, too little has been heard from ‘the lady up there on the right’, as David Dimbleby called her. Her perception that MPs have behaved more like idiots than scoundrels is reassuringly clear-headed and proportionate to this weird affair. Meanwhile the Telegraph, vaingloriously drunk on its own ...”

“... male counterpart, just as devious, just as heated. He’s no gentleman, but then she’s no lady. Beguiled by Ashley, dismissive of sexual desire and apparently hostile to the idea of motherhood, Scarlett resists him. These passions play out through the apocalypse of the American Civil War, a conflict that calls on all Scarlett’s resources as she ...”