“... people, furthermore, believe in King Arthur in a way that admits no argument. Not long ago I met a lady in Peoria, Illinois, who contributed annually to a fund for the upkeep of Guinevere’s grave in the churchyard at Longtown, on the Anglo-Scottish border north of Carlisle. She took very ill the least suggestion that there might be some doubt about its ...”

“... Valentinian presented him with something much better: the signet ring of a princess, sent by the lady herself. Apart perhaps from his meeting with Pope Leo, this is by far the most romanticised episode of Attila’s career. It is hard to resist the image of the princess in the tower, pining for her barbarian saviour, but the reality is rather different. The ...”

“... major misfortune’. She leaves for the Sisters of Mercy Junior College and Langley marries a lady of good family called Lila van Dijk, who ‘had a mind to change everything’. But she is soon driven out when the cook’s grandson, a cornet player called Harold Robileaux, turns up and starts rehearsing with his band in the house. Once he has left, new ...”

“... in those days, you’d neighbours in your houses helping.’ Furthermore, ‘every street had its lady,’ an experienced older married woman or widow who was routinely called on in times of illness or need. These ‘neighbourhood health authorities’, as Beier calls them, would do anything from delivering babies to laying out the dead, and were the ...”

“... the supreme being by name. In Alan Clark’s diaries, Margaret Thatcher was invariably ‘The Lady’. Mullin, who on this evidence harbours fewer illusions about high office than most ex-ministers, refers to Blair simply as ‘The Man’, ‘Himself’, or even, on one or two surreal occasions, as ‘The Presence’. Whether Blair’s kenning takes the ...”

“... sired by the king officially acknowledged: The potential maîtresse en titre needed a court lady to sponsor and present her at court. Louise de la Vallière, Louis’s first candidate for the position, was already his long-term mistress, but their two children were officially bastards. Louis, setting out for the battlefield and aware that he might not ...”

“... is how I would describe my driving. I have been told I drive ‘like an old lady’. An older woman told me this. I admit to an appalling sense of direction. (No other male will admit to this.) And I am given to reverie, as no doubt others in my line of work occasionally are. But although 93 is a straight road the Maestro is in conductor ...”

“... answers the phone, hears her accent, and straightaway yells out to David Lacks that a lady is calling about the cells – Skloot had dues to pay. Financing her research with credit cards and student loans, she started working on the book in her late twenties, and finished a decade later. Armed with a winning manner and what must have been deep ...”

“... in Western culture, Soong Meiling was perfectly cast for the role of alluring Eastern Dragon Lady. At the Cairo summit, Alan Brooke wrote in his diary that she had ‘a good figure which she knew how to display at its best’, and that he’d heard ‘a suppressed neigh’ from the younger participants as she crossed ‘the most shapely of legs’. When ...”

“... to be related in the larger sequence – as the small number of sonnets about the supposed ‘Dark Lady’ in Shakespeare’s sequence appear to do. This aspect of the sonnet began with Dante’s Vita Nuova of 1295, which mixes verse with prose in order to relate, part as allegory, part as fiction, his love for Beatrice and his sorrow at her death. Dante’s ...”

“... but also whole bears – and, very probably, people too. Then there’s the ‘Fyrkat woman’, a lady of some status buried in Jutland with what looks like sorceress gear: charms, henbane seeds, an iron wand and material for ‘witch ointment’. Vikings readily turned Christian for tactical and diplomatic reasons, but one wonders whether the religion took ...”

“... Chinese opposition to foreign arrogance and encroachment. Since Sterling Seagrave’s Dragon Lady of 1992, Cixi has been the subject of or a major figure in a dozen books, as well as films and television series. Still, we evidently need more Cixi. Jung Chang does not merely repeat what are now truisms in the representation of Cixi – that she has been ...”

“... And isn’t it too broad a stroke to make the husband a dentist? The wife a delicate, suffering lady who plays the harp? Please. Marie Williams at the harp. Jean-Yves Tadié is enchanted by these artistic possibilities. In the letters, he says, Mme Marie Williams ‘appears to us as if she were a heroine in a novel by Maupassant, Notre coeur for ...”

“... Lawrence knew that its first readers would be Joynson-Hicks’s Home Office, the confiscators of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and was torn between wanting to get it published and wanting to tell the censors off for their squeamish minds. When the manuscript was duly confiscated by the Royal Mail in 1929, he retyped the whole thing and expanded it further. This ...”

“... the idea. ‘Heigh ho,’ Box wrote in her diary: ‘I see a storming future ahead of this young lady.’ Muriel and her sister-in-law Betty (known as Betty Box Office) are two of Cooke’s subjects. They did make careers as film director and producer respectively, though their fortunes were uneven (and their relationship not always harmonious). While Muriel ...”