“... for a particularly precocious and cynical 13- year-old – when he got up he proved to be a young lady, somewhat over twenty. I wonder whether I can be bothered to go back to that establishment at all.She travelled around France and Italy, where she seems to have spent most of her time swimming, visiting museums and churches, and looking at soldiers in ...”

“... Canal from St Mark’s which is one of the city’s defining landmarks, was built to thank Our Lady of Health for the end of the plague of 1630-31. Santa Rosalia, the patron saint of Palermo, delivered that city a few years before in 1624-25; she was processed through the streets last year in the hope she would defend it again, against Covid-19. St ...”

“... One day a woman conducting genealogical research called Clifton. This ‘thin-voiced white lady’ said she didn’t remember the names of Clifton’s ancestors. Clifton replied: ‘Who remembers the names of the slaves? Only the children of slaves.’ After an awkward conversation, the woman ‘sends the history she has compiled and in it are her ...”

“... to appear as though they’re sleeping – sleep and death being ‘pictures’ of each other, as Lady Macbeth says. Kevin, based in Croydon, removes hospital tags and tubes, fits caps beneath the eyelids, secures the jaw and, if limbs need repositioning, snaps the bonded proteins in the joints. Next, he slides a tube into an incision in the carotid artery ...”

“... She wrote poems and designed furniture, theatrical costumes and sets; she was a society lady, an art-world insider, a Proust fanatic and a New Woman. At her funeral, Georgia O’Keeffe said: ‘Florine made no concessions of any kind to any person or situation.’ But she was also great fun. When she finished a painting, she gave it a tea ...”

“... in the pages of her own magazine, described di Prima as ‘too concerned maybe with not being a “lady writer”’: her work, he said, suffered from a lack of ‘gentleness’. (In ‘The Quarrel’ she tells her man that ‘I probably have just as much fucking work to do as you … /I am sick I said to the woodpile of doing dishes.’) Creeley’s ...”

“... since it came with the responsibility of collecting tolls from every passing ship on behalf of Lady Batten – amounting to several hundred pounds a year, the only source of income she would have as a widow. When Batten died, in 1667, Mingo presumably came into this inheritance. It looks like a happy ending. But what was the beginning?There are some ...”

“... who soon started an affair with her principal man and allowed Max to slip gracefully away. The lady he eventually married, Florence Kahn, American and Jewish, was also an actress, with a solid kindly family home in Memphis. Shy and refined, she found her chosen profession agonisingly difficult, but was intense and moderately successful in the role of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... life that I met Mr Campbell Johnston was one afternoon when I went to make certain proposals to a lady who became my wife. You can imagine that I did not welcome Mr Campbell Johnston’s presence and that I said the most wild and provocative things in order to drive him from the room. I well remember the feeling of desperation as I uttered one absurd and ...”

“... Japanese forms of the story, Callas’s performance in La Traviata in Mexico City in 1951, and The Lady of the Camellias by Dumas fils: all these are brought into relation with the tale of an ancient woman, Señora Consuelo, who entices a young scholar, Felipe, to live in her house on the pretext that he should edit her long-dead husband’s memoirs. In fact ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... will be fundamentally at odds with such an approach. Marcia Pointon is good on the portraits of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkish dress. Hers was an experience oddly complementary to Haydon’s: but what she found was salvation rather than martyrdom through self-mythologising in art. She was a woman for whom some form of public representation was ...”

“... the small boy who asks: ‘Mamma, is that alive? ... I want that, mamma, I want that dear little lady.’ There are moments when nastier desires enter, as Miss M is followed down a village street, and sees on some of the watching faces ‘an expression that was not solely curiosity ... a kind of hunger, a dog-like gleam’. But for the most part the ...”