“... 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 ...”

“... behind the last row of chairs. Now, at least I was visible. At a desk on a platform sat a young lady with a telephone permanently at her ear. From the main saleroom below was transmitted the conduct of the auction. Evidently, the auctioneer announced the lots and took bids from below; the telephonist took the bids from above – and the bids were ...”

“... is in sharp contrast to Mr Anderson’s account, in which he says more than once that if only the lady had chosen Tristan Garel Jones (did I hear someone say ‘Who?’) as her Chief Whip last year instead of Tim Renton, and had had someone a bit less laid-back than Peter Morrison (‘who?’ again) as her Parliamentary Private Secretary, then she would still ...”

“... runs from Morgann to Bradley and was exploded by L.C. Knights in “How many children had Lady Macbeth?”’ Knights exploded nothing: he joined the new vogue for formalising and depersonalising Shakespeare’s world, and giving it a spatial and symbolic dimension instead of a predominantly human one. In a sense, the reason was plain. Freudian ...”

“... he was writing Peter Grimes. In 1936, after hearing a concert performance of Shostakovich’s The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, he wrote in his diary that he would ‘defend it through thick & thin against these charges of “lack of style” ... It is the composer’s heritage to take what he wants from where he wants – & to write music ... The “eminent ...”