“... 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 ...”

“... to complain about all her dogs. The Globe ran a headline in 1991, claiming she ‘Lives Like a Bag Lady!’ and had to issue a retraction after she sued. She has been spotted holding up the queue in the drugstore while picking through her piles of coupons, but that could be anybody’s grandma. It’s hardly Norma Desmond – how much easier it would be to ...”

“... to bed Abram’s wife Sara, ‘R. Berekiah said: Because he dared to approach the shoe of that lady.’ One way or another, as Hezser says, the ‘later rabbis were well aware of the symbolism of the foot and shoe’. Shoes, make of them what you will. With or without a Freudian tinge, shoes relate to the sacred and profane. God’s first instruction to ...”

“... which has fallen into the hands of Gray via its current owner, an American academic called Lady Sara Sim-Jaegar (an anagram of his own full name). The manuscript consists of three historical narratives and a series of diaries written by a retired Glaswegian schoolmaster, John Tunnock, a reasonably transparent alter ego for the author. The diaries ...”

“... I’m not going to stop people writing what they want. I would say, though, that the lady I knew has changed.’ You would think he had learned by now that women can’t be trusted simply to be beloved without spoiling everything by pooing in the ...”

“... The story opens on a picture of a very large young lady, ‘a truly massive young person’, crossing from one house to another in Newport, Rhode Island, site of ‘florid’ villas and other structures ‘smothered in senseless architectural ornament’. On the verandah of the second house she finds her father, an inordinately rich man, sourly awaiting the death of his former partner, a slightly less rich man ...”

“... speculate about the future life her erstwhile fiancé might enjoy without her, with a ‘radiant lady with droves of bullocks on the plains of Meath’. And when father and son depart to make their living out of tale-telling, Pegeen Mike is already structuring a tragic model of the events and their protagonist: ‘Oh, my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve ...”

“... which her childhood has kept her for much of her adulthood, by repeatedly invoking Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shallot’. Only in writing her book, she intimates, has she finally escaped the ‘four gray walls and four gray towers’ of parental oppression. It is one of the cast-iron rules of biographical writing: the more damaging and transgressive the ...”

“... apple crate, sweating in a black suit, who began pleading to his brothers and sisters; an old bag-lady retrieving a carnation from a bin to put in her hair.’ There are always things to be noticed, things that stand out: Smith doesn’t invariably look for them. Sometimes, though, the writing works beautifully. There’s a scene in which Alsana, Clara and ...”

“... 1930s the war remained, for all its horror, a boon. E.M. Delafield, whose ‘Diary of a Provincial Lady’ in Time and Tide offered readers the agonised thoughts of Bridget Jones’s great-aunt, remembered it as ‘pure liberation’. The overthrow of the awful Edwardians, the triumph of Bloomsbury over the Kensington of Leslie Stephen, were unmitigated ...”

“... art. In the era of Sir Giles, a dash of Spanish Gothic entered the equation, as in his exquisite Lady Chapel at Liverpool Cathedral. These things go unnoticed, however, because foreign motifs were blended into the later churches of the Gothic Revival without the ostentation of the mid-Victorians. The third of Scott’s major churches is a disappointment. In ...”

“... Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. She looked back over her shoulder, laughing with the jolly tea-lady, as she scooshed the big syringe. Attend! I wanted to say to her, though she hardly needed to. Here, I’ll do it. I’ll kill the infection. I’ll do it with attention. Prayerfully, if you like. The bed where the woman had read her paperback and the man ...”