“... almost always shown fully clothed. Whereas Eve is born in her birthday suit, Pandora, the first lady of the Greeks, comes with a full kit. Dress seems part and parcel of women’s identity. Athena springs out in full regalia and Aphrodite’s girdle seems to contain all her erotic power. To see a goddess naked therefore is an epiphany too far. The very ...”

“... of Jane Seymour with Henry’s hoped-for heir is darkly shadowed by the phantom pregnancy of Lady Lisle, wife of the governor of Calais. An interview with Henry’s daughter Mary, during which Cromwell tries to impress on her the need to obey her father or die resisting him, both of them conscious of the fact that she is of marriageable age and he ...”

“... she affects to know nothing of her husband’s behaviour before and during her stint as First Lady. ‘Mind you,’ she told a local newspaper, ‘they were talking about Sierra Leone. It was not a Liberian issue.’ Lack of accountability, among powerful families, clans, political colleagues and comrades-in-arms, is guaranteed to flourish when we ...”

“... after he was released from prison. ‘Everywhere I go, people are asking about you.’ The first lady, Jeannette Kagame, told Karegeya’s wife that he had only himself to blame. ‘We tried to warn you about Fred Rwigyema and you didn’t listen to us. If my husband wasn’t a tolerant man, you could be dead by now.’He soon was. An inquest in South Africa ...”

“... liked the safety of home environments, not foreign ones, and couldn’t wait ‘to be a grown-up lady at home all the time’. She takes us on her ‘house extension journey’ and it’s totes emosh and some people get jels. She was seriously overweight at one time but has lost eight stone since 2011 wearing a gastric band. ‘I’m not expecting people to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than a trace of the millennialism that had informed her anti-slavery. Although, in her notorious Lady Byron Vindicated, she explicitly criticised the English marriage laws that made the position of the married woman ‘in many respects, precisely similar to that of the negro slave’, she, like Child, refused in the end to support Elizabeth Cady Stanton and ...”

“... extensible form of the sonnet sequence: his ‘I’ in love, the distant ‘you’ of the lady, and the yearning between the two, set up the main features of what later ages would call ‘lyric’. It wasn’t until the mid-16th century, though, that a tripartite division of all poetry into dramatic, epic and lyric media – a division roughly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an inveterate biographer of Tory premiers – was asked to write this book by Eden’s widow, Lady Avon. One consequence is a decided reticence about Eden’s private life. Thorpe continually hints at his difficult temperament but seems not to want to say that Eden inherited his father’s passionate, even hysterical fits of temper. Similarly, we are told ...”

“... the eponymous slow man, and an ‘author’, who is, once again, Coetzee’s Australian ‘lady novelist’, the redoubtable Elizabeth Costello. Yet this is Foe with a difference. Though the gender reversal is important – Foe is in part about a woman struggling against the suasive powers of a male author – more emphasis is placed on what the two ...”

“... and that our ‘modern stereotype of grandmothers is more nearly a smiling white-haired old lady bearing Christmas presents than a wiry forager lugging large tubers critical for warding off starvation.’ According to Hawkes’s theory the menopause doesn’t require any special explanation: great apes may cease breeding altogether at about the age of ...”