“... 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 ...”

“... Foundation inquiry into the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. The members of this committee (chaired by Lady Runciman) are essentially pragmatic: It has become inescapably clear to us that the eradication of drug use is not achievable and it is not therefore either a realistic or a sensible goal of public policy. The main aim of the law must be to control and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... swung open the huge heavy doors of the treasury, where gifts to Nuestra Señora del Pilar, Our Lady of the Pillar, were kept. A blaze of diamonds burst from the dark cupboard: emeralds, rubies, gold, crystal, every precious gem and mineral cut and polished and set into adornments for her statue. The kings of Spain, and then General Franco, were leading ...”

“... in … as background to her work’, ostensibly because it was ‘what that very private lady would have wished’, but perhaps also because it was relatively uneventful. Jennifer Kloester’s new book has no such scruples: granted ‘carte blanche’ by Heyer’s only son, she has been through a vast quantity of ‘new and untapped’ letters and ...”

“... 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 ...”