“... 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 ...”

“... Russian bogatyr, the warrior landowner who performs feats of strength and daring, even rescuing a lady from an evil enchanter, a neighbouring landlord. Old myth slipped more easily into 19th-century Russia’s world of serfs and powerful gentry than any attempt at Medieval and Arthurian revival could in industrial England. In Oblomov Goncharov turned his ...”

“... artists merely toyed with the concept of politeness, playing it off as style against content – Lady Booby’s and Slipslop’s genteelisms against their Mandevillian desires. In the Harlot’s Progress this was Moll Hackabout’s ladylike politeness in serving tea after stealing a watch from her customer, or the silk gown she wears in Bridewell while ...”

“... choosing both in different branches of a branching cosmos. It will interest many others only as Lady Chatterley’s Lover interested the reviewer in the American Field and Stream: ‘This fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper contains many passages on pheasant raising, ways to control vermin, and other chores and ...”

“... Massachusetts Avenue that I used to frequent, as much because I was intrigued by the little old lady with a green parakeet on her shoulder who owned the place (she was reputed to be Whitehead’s daughter or niece), as because I was always in the market for a set of Conrad, Parkman or Scott. One day I went into the tiny shop just as she was saying to a ...”