“... foot. Another of the new poems, ‘The Earthenware Head’, coolly deflates Plath’s poem ‘The Lady and the Earthenware Head’, criticising her compositional methods as strategies of evasion: You ransacked thesaurus in your poem about it, Veiling its mirror, rhyming yourself into safety… A lot of the poems in Birthday Letters set about an unveiling of ...”

“... appointed manager of Hartlepool United. Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman will be much missed. A feisty lady with a good left hook ... shrill of voice and short of temper. I have been keeping her for years. And so on. We still await a British version of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and it is probably too much to hope that those who write our election ...”

“... waiting at the bottom of the ramp in the third book, who may or may not be the same ‘luscious lady’ with ‘shapely legs’ and a ‘short, snugly fitting blue pinstriped suit’ who mysteriously pays his bus fare in the first one. There’s also the bus conductress he will have to brush past in order to make his exit, ‘the thought of which made his ...”

“... of the Gaelic League, receives two sentences. The contributions of Alice Milligan, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Constance Markievicz are ignored, presumably because they too were Protestants. So are the contributions of other revivalists, such as James Joyce, a Catholic nationalist who loathed the Church because of its condemnation of the nationalist ...”

“... under Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna’s direction – was hung beside a 16th-century icon of Our Lady of ...”

“... notice – silently insert a $20 note before instructing me to go up to the counter and ask the lady to check again. This time, the only reply was the sound of computer keys being punched, followed by the screech of a dot matrix printer. Three tickets to Murmansk were thrust into my hand. The elation of having beaten the system dissipated as soon as I ...”

“... one regret in the women department,’ Trump boasts, ‘that I never had the opportunity to court Lady Diana Spencer.’ According to Selina Scott, Diana said that the huge bouquets Trump sent to Kensington Palace gave her the creeps, but Trump says that if she hadn’t been killed he’d have ‘had a shot’. If instead of his current wife, a former ...”

“... the couch with her shoes off and returning to find her mind changed, purse in hand, and the young lady ready to go home, dammit.’ Once she was suitably inebriated, the final trap was an Osvaldo Borsani couch that flipped to horizontal at the touch of a button. Design for the Playboy townhouse (1962) In the late 1950s, newly divorced, Hefner tried to ...”

“... cremello ghost horses carrying the spectres of defeated Indians, castles that go up in flames, Lady Godiva, horned horses, the five-year-old “Elfin Equestrian”, Epsom on Derby day, six fairy ponies, one of whom leapt over the others, and two hundred Arabian horses re-enacting the Fall of Khartoum’. The equine performers were such ...”

“... offering new ways of handling awkward or challenging social situations. By the early 18th century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu could write of the Duchess of Marlborough: ‘We continue to see one another, like two people that are resolved to hate with civility.’ Civil behaviour involved a mastery of both deference and superiority, the ability to please people ...”

“... ball of discord now resolved as a tribute from Diana, her tutelary goddess. Philip Sidney in The Lady of May, the little entertainment he staged in 1578 at Leicester’s park and gardens of Wanstead, went so far as to impose an unscripted speaking part on the Queen, presumably without warning, forcing her to adjudicate between two fictional rival ...”

“... Hannah’s first-person narrative on Esther Summerson, models the slave-owner Mrs Cosgrove on Lady Dedlock and takes the slave tracker Mr Trappe from Mr Tulkinghorn. As Robbins argues, passages are not copied or plagiarised; Crafts’s borrowings are highly skilled, and very aware of the differences between Bleak House and her own story. It is odd in the ...”

“... a long passage in which Mencken celebrates the charming effect of a woman’s conversation. The lady in question has ‘a soft, low-pitched, agreeable voice’ that talks of anything and everything, but ‘No politics. No business. No religion. No metaphysics. Nothing challenging and vexatious.’ The female chatter is so gentle and soothing that the male ...”

“... the existing regime. Duff Cooper, Liddell says, was ‘feeling rather bad’ because his wife, Lady Diana, was facing prosecution for accepting a free sack of stale bread for her pigs. More enlightening was the remark made to him by Churchill in May 1940 when France fell, and passed on to Liddell: ‘The end,’ Churchill is supposed to have said, ‘is ...”

“... deal. He complained that the media exaggerate the violence in the city. ‘One day a rich Kurdish lady was kidnapped,’ he said. ‘They claimed she was a female Kurdish leader. In fact it was just an ordinary kidnapping.’ He conceded that many Arab police officers were probably collaborating with the insurgents and that several Arab police chiefs had been ...”