“... 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 ...”

“... Devonshire, would have enjoyed the complimentary references to his scandalously flaunted mistress Lady Penelope Rich in several of Byrd’s songs written around this time.And so Byrd’s public life is refracted through the images of these English noblemen. He was the much honoured and privileged royal servant to Elizabeth and James for more than half a ...”

“... giving the experience a beginning and an end. Except that it’s never over, cancer, until the fat lady pops her clogs. No one is ever cured of cancer, except technically. Even if I were to pass the magic five-year survival post, or go into remission, the possibility of a return of the cancer cells will always be there. Binary oppositions turn ...”

“... Dos Passos went to a cabaret near Taksim in the early 1920s,’ King writes, he found a Russian lady on a stage doing a peasant dance, two English girls crooning in knee socks and sweaters, a troupe of Greek acrobats … In 1928, however, city planners cleaned up part of the square and created a bronze and marble monument to the republic’s founders ...”

“... Though she seemed unimpressed by the sole privilege she’d been awarded as her country’s first lady, Indian newspapers reported that she was willing to return to her husband’s side, if he asked. In May, unhappy that she hadn’t received a satisfactory answer and upset by the use of her maiden name in the official response, she submitted a second ...”

“... dissuades Jim from picking up a magazine on an unaccustomed day, because she has noticed that the lady in the railway station kiosk, obviously smitten with the handsome young man, gets herself dolled up for his visits and will feel at a disadvantage if he surprises her when she’s looking less than her best. Empathy is the antipodes of trauma, though this ...”

“... carefully. For it falls to us to perceive if their bond is strong enough to cross together. This lady is reluctant to accept it, but her bond with her husband was simply too weak. Let her look into her heart, then dare say my judgment that day was in error. If this ferryman could be described as enigmatic he is an enigma of an entirely transparent sort; he ...”

“... the road), the mild threat of the band of teenagers gathered there from dusk, ‘Jeanine, the old lady who lives across from the bus stop’, the church square, the muddy paths that lead out of the village into the vast fields of wheat and rape beyond, the impoverished households as well as the more middle-class ones, the factory on the edge of the village ...”

“... or even in Livingstone’s case religious – were often financed by private individuals (by Lady Franklin, for example) or by societies, but they were increasingly presented in the media as undertaken for the glory of the nation. In the crudest sense, it has to be a British expedition that gets to the Pole first or discovers the North-West Passage. But ...”