“... spelling of ‘Vodou’ deliberately.) Under Duvalier, Fred Voodoo told reporters about the first lady’s refrigerated closet for furs. After the quake, he told them that rain leaked into his tent at night and forced everyone to their feet, holding their babies till the storm passed. Once written up, Fred Voodoo’s trials are forgotten. He is a disposable ...”

“... Nasreen, who bears ‘no more resemblance to Diana or Ceres or Proserpina (or for that matter Lady Lazarus or Emily Dickinson or the Three Witches) than I myself do to Actaeon or Sir Gawain or Joseph Shapiro.’ Most stalkers, according to Reid Meloy, suffer from what he calls a ‘narcissistic linking fantasy’: intense admiration becomes an imaginary ...”

“... while in Edwin Lutyens’s utopia, Hampstead Garden Suburb, she presides from the dome of the Lady Chapel in St Jude’s, painted by a returned soldier, who surrounded her with a parade of heroines from the Bible, figures of history, and contemporary women busy at numerous vital tasks. Even if, as some historians argue, it was the war and women’s war ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of 37 Ridley Avenue (this on page 37); an abortion Leah had; the spooky monologue of a statue, Our Lady of Willesden, ‘the Black Madonna’; and a scene at a pharmacy, when Leah is given the wrong packet of photographs, one with pictures of Shar. Hard to tell the significance of that 37: a prime number; the normal human body temperature in Celsius; the ...”

“... cards shuffled and dealt from some unnumberable deck: ‘Bronzebeard’, ‘the king’, ‘the lady’, ‘the French brothers’, ‘the blond one’, ‘the forked nose’. What’s more, Nostradamus seems to take perverse delight in demonstrating repeatedly the relative futility of prediction: ‘Death, then pillage: good advice, coming late’: When ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Henry James and Stephen Crane were fresh and sightings of Radclyffe Hall and her friend Una, Lady Troubridge, lent a touch of verisimilitude to the farcical Rye that, passed off as ‘Tilling’, was the abode of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia and ‘Quaint Irene’, the resident Post-Impressionist. Burra thrived on literary and artistic connections ...”

“... 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 ...”