“... Spanish – by no means the same as 1880s Madrid Spanish – to be second nature to her. The old lady completed new translations of both Noli Me Tangere and its even more savage 1891 sequel El Filibusterismo just before she died. In most respects, it is a huge advance over previous translations, handsomely laid out and with enough footnotes to be helpful ...”

“... he had little trouble in locating Britain’s middlebrow. He was curious enough to start reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover and conventional enough to throw it onto the fire when teased about it.The shortcoming of Ridley’s graceful, funny book is simply its form. Even the best royal biographies exaggerate the impact of monarchs on the fortunes of monarchy ...”

“... Pamela punctuates with hasty dashes when she recalls affecting scenes (her attendance at her lady’s deathbed; her new master’s ominously smiling approach to her, alone in her late mistress’s dressing-room, as she is finishing this very letter). Richardson eventually did away with these dashes. The original Pamela turns readily to colloquialism: she ...”

“... in doing this. I did not know a word of Hottentot, and could never therefore have explained to the lady what the object of my footrule could be; and I really dared not ask my worthy missionary host to interpret for me. I therefore felt in a dilemma as I gazed at her form, that gift of bounteous nature to this favoured race, which no mantua-maker, with all her ...”

“... A great Irish lady, her disgraced nephew and a young priest with strong Republican sympathies are driving through Dublin on St Patrick’s Day, 1916. ‘They were speaking of patriots, Dublin associations of famous rebels, ancient and modern.’ Merrion Square evokes the memory of a distinguished Irishman whom the English put on trial ...”

“... they enjoyed refighting the Reformation. Plays, paintings (famously Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey), new editions of John Lingard’s revisionist History of England, as well as Pugin’s architectural manifesto Contrasts, all treated it as the determining event in national history. The facts were fiercely argued and at a popular level there was ...”

“... Cowper always found it hard to discover in the world was equally obscured in a letter he wrote to Lady Hesketh as the impeachment trial was due to begin in February 1788. In its sweeping, almost sublime gestures, and its descent into nostalgic regret for long lost adolescent loyalties, it bears witness to the small, incestuous world within whose confines ...”

“... refused to speak, then went along with the identification, then changed her mind after a former lady-in-waiting to the tsarina visited the asylum and said that Anna was too short to be Tatiana. But her supporters refused to give up on the idea of her being one of the grand duchesses. Because she wouldn’t speak, they gave her a list of the ...”

“... drunk and suggested that they should all burst into the drawing-room and each seize a ‘Sabine’ lady. Burns did so, but ‘the gentry and soldier friends of Riddell acted in feigned horror and Burns was ejected from Friar’s Carse in disgrace.’ Hogg’s details seem embroidered and weakly supported, and he confuses Maria with Elizabeth Riddell. But ...”

“... and write English and to admire British culture.Sessarakoo travelled aboard a slave ship, the Lady Carolina, heading to England via Barbados. In one version of the story, the captain’s sudden death – the result of dysentery, malnutrition or insurrection – left Sessarakoo unprotected. There was no one to confirm his identity as a Fante of royal birth ...”

“... like Sarah Orne Jewett and Kate Chopin. Both in such romantic and allegorical tales as ‘The Lady of Little Fishing’ (1874) and ‘Castle Nowhere’ (1875) and in the more realistic or satirical ones like ‘Miss Elisabetha’ (1875), Woolson is an extraordinarily evocative landscape artist as well as a subtly ironic stylist; if the early stories make ...”

“... Centre looking.’ In BedThe sign on the wall of the flat where Ina works reads ‘Beautiful Young Lady’. ‘That’s it,’ Ina says. ‘It doesn’t say nothing more. It doesn’t say name, it doesn’t say colour, it doesn’t say nothing. And who wants to come up, comes up.’ Then Ina waits. ‘It’s a gamble. You flip the coin. The same as working in ...”

“... Let’s just say I’m a neo-surrealist – a bit dark, a bit Goth, a bit grunge – a sort of lady Hans Bellmer. As a child I was enchanted by the Surrealists’ Exquisite Cadavers game – the one in which you make comic figures out of mismatched body parts. This love of the grotesque has never gone away: even today, I enjoy putting dog or cat heads on ...”

“... where he stayed with a comfy German family, conceiving a considerable admiration for the lady of the house (‘too fine for her surroundings’), though not for the gentleman, and then to Jena, ostensibly to follow philosophy lectures at the university, but devoting more attention to the poets, including Rilke and Hölderlin: ‘Their language is ...”

“... the nationalist tiger by expropriating Anglo-Iranian. (Its remaining employees, the vicar and the lady who ran the guest-house in Abadan – three days before, she’d attacked an Iranian officer with an umbrella – gathered in front of the Gymkhana Club on 4 October for HMS Mauritius to take them to Basra. The ship’s band sailed away playing ‘Colonel ...”