“... but the cheque never arrives: ‘You fool, you fool, he told himself . . . his aunt was an old lady, any number of things could have happened to her during the year. But you couldn’t wait, could you?’ There is no one he can tap for money. Juleson has a month to make the repayment before one of Oberholster’s short-fused debt collectors will run him ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with ideas that belong to his Cambridge youth, but some are still vigorously alive: ‘To an Old Lady’, for instance, and ‘Camping Out’ and ‘Arachne’, ‘Legal Fiction’, and the beautiful ‘Villanelle’ which begins ‘It is the pain, it is the pain, endures.’ (Empson remarks with customary generosity on the technical superiority over his own ...”

“... direct sales concerns like the Realsilk Hosiery Company, Stanley Home Products and the ‘Avon Lady’. Avon, a cosmetics company, changed the gender dynamics by employing women to sell to women in the home. The ‘hostess party’ was the next step – a social gathering that was also an opportunity for selling. Here the pioneer was Wearever ...”

“... trust. Atovmyan claims to have witnessed more than a hundred performances of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth before the fateful Bolshoi performance attended by Stalin in January 1936 which led to the work’s denunciation in Pravda. Shostakovich was himself in Moscow that day on his way to a concert in Archangel. Shortly before leaving to catch his ...”

“... hauled off to unfamiliar and impermanent surroundings, and looked after by a strange German lady.’ In the end, the divorce decree was granted. Andrew was given custody of the children for eight months a year, Nora for four, but she was forbidden to remove them from Allegheny County without Andrew’s or the court’s written approval. In 1920, Mellon ...”

“... and about his reading, which was more adventurous than one might have expected. It included Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses and Du côté de chez Swann. A word of mild and, as experience suggests, useless complaint about these volumes as physical objects. They are heavy and tightly bound – presumably to save space by reducing margins. You need both ...”

“... it was difficult to be sure what image best captured the brooding presence of the eponymous Lady. If she appeared to the Tory faithful as a painfully nostalgic evocation of the glory days, this may remind us that the average age of party members is currently 67. If she inspired Labour to suggest that an otherwise dull election was fraught with ...”

“... per household. Each year, Trychay would tell the assembled parishioners: ‘Now how many of our Lady scheppe be dede and gon this ere: and how many there be as yett a lyfe and yn hoo ys kepyng they be now schall ye have knolyge of’ (or ‘ye schall hyre’, or ‘y wyll schow you’). As the vicar conducted the annual sheep count around the parish, ‘a ...”

“... in an ancient pram. The naked man wrapped in his inadequate eiderdown. The teetering albino-blonde lady in cylindrical black, regular as a tramcar in her solipsistic excursions; remarkable in that she doesn’t have an accompanying pet, just the feeling that one is missing, that she pauses, drops a shoulder, sets her pace to accommodate this absence. There is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Bengal’s cultural blend when she visits the ‘country-born’ – i.e. mixed-race – ‘young lady’ in the room next door: ‘Judge my surprise, Arabella, when … I found her … actually smoking a pipe.’ Hookah-smoking was one of the most obviously ‘orientalised’ (Sophia’s term) habits of Britons in India, and would later be phased out in ...”

“... being for crying out loud.’ A maid reassures her interlocutor: ‘Your grandmother was a kind lady, not like the people I used to work for before.’In one monologue the host of a radio show observes that ‘there are numerous varieties of Lagos accents from the posh to the unvarnished and there are accents inflected with the residue of various native ...”

“... in itself. The curator has small silver paws, very like the paws of the ermine in the painting Lady with Ermine, now on display in the nation’s other museum, which the visiting lecturer had been told was not worth visiting. After the tour, as they exit the storage room, an older man walks beside the curator whispering, Stop blushing, just be ...”