“... 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 ...”

“... Parliament. Johnson, if he has a working majority, will have less need to bypass Parliament. So Lady Hale, or her successor, can do her worst, and he will probably be fine with it, as he was ultimately fine with her doing her worst last time round. It is a Corbyn minority government that will feel the pinch of Johnson’s botched prorogation. Second, a ...”

“... a birthday in her absence, hardly suggests a close connection. In herself she’s a generic old lady, evoked largely by her possessions: a tarnished copper kettle, her tissue-holder shaped like a hen. There are usually more atoms whizzing around, even in what we’re used to calling the nuclear family. Collectively, Phillips’s choices have the effect of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Nancy was an only child, and when her parents separated she moved with her mother to London, where Lady Emerald Cunard, as Maud later styled herself, became a leading literary socialite. It is one thing to be bored by steamers and convoys and trains; another to be bored because one’s father owns them. What things ‘mean to’ Cunard is the question that ...”

“... A startling print by Caspar von Regensburg, c.1485, portrays the Venus-like figure of Frau Minne (Lady Love) as a nude dominatrix trampling on a hapless lover’s heart. With her right hand she impales another heart on a spear, while her left pierces one with a sword. Surrounding the goddess, 16 more hearts are roasted in flames, guillotined, crushed in a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... contrition! We are druv’ to it. John Bull will have it so. Tu l’as voulu John Dandin! And his lady still more! Let us toe the line, my brothers, and invest with care. Londres vaut bien une messe.’ Then catch at your own coat-tails. ‘An unpardonable digression! I am like a bus driver who is perpetually jumping down to fight some passer-by. I apologise ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... question of Pincher’s timing. He began work in December, having previously been writing, with Lady Falkender, a book called The Infiltrators. Planned originally for April, the launch was brought forward so that it appeared in the Daily Mail for four successive days preceding the launch of the Social Democrats on 26 March. The new party was launched in the ...”