“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Monsignor Knox comes to work on Russell’s farm: ‘Has anyone got a farm like mine? In one field Lady Wey[mouth] doing Shepherdess to my flock and in another a Monsignor of the Roman Church pulling and topping swedes.’ The Church seems to be crowding in on him. A monk comes to stay. ‘When I light the bedroom candles he says: “O I haven’t said my ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of one artist who still can’t bear to leave: ‘He did well by us, but now he’s like an old lady in the attic. He’s failed but he won’t give up. For us it’s over; the Revolution’s a piece of kitsch.’ Guillermo Cabrera Infante uses the term as well, but for him it’s the ‘kitsch of death’, and his obsession with Cuba’s Castro is a lot ...”

“... his social superiors. He deplored loose talk at official meetings and was much shocked to hear a Lady Robinson say, of one of a batch of prisoners: ‘I could break a commandment with him.’ He resented a Navy Commissioner’s ‘maid and whore’ being placed in his church pew. Yet the hypocrite had moral courage of a strange kind, as when he fired off a ...”

“... the latter.’ This is dangerously true. The idle or incompetent doctor, presented with an old lady suffering from aches and pains, or shortness of breath, or difficulty with memory, is tempted to collude with the general perception and say ‘It’s your age, dear’ rather than diagnose osteo-arthritis, cardiac failure or the adverse effects of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... different from the one around them. In a bold-faced piece of bohemianism, the utopianists of Lady Mary Fox’s Account of an Expedition to the interior of New Holland (1837) hold casual buffets rather than dinner parties. In Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1778), utopia is a country mansion in Cornwall, an anodyne English pastoral in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... structures. Is the Spanish dolor ‘pain’ or ‘sorrow’ in English? Well, there is Our Lady of Sorrows, but you would need to speak to the doctor about your pain. How should we render a subjunctive which is not exactly a conditional, as in a phrase like ‘cuando yo me muera’? ‘When I die’ doesn’t catch any of it, but ‘if I should ...”