“... and ham sandwich. ‘Pretty good,’ he said. Then he leaned over to me, whispering. ‘That lady hates us.’‘Were you busy earlier on?’ I asked her.‘Packed,’ she said. ‘The workers and the schoolkids, just by.’‘Where do the young people go for nights out?’ Karl said.She looked at him as if human nature were always biting at her ...”

“... in those days. Me, I’d rather be in a dentist’s chair than go to one of those things where the lady poet whispers in her breathless little lady-poet voice about how come she’s so out of sorts and about granny’s mouldering petticoat in the attic, this sort of drivel. But the poet-boy, he’s worse still, striking this ...”

“... all accounts, Rose was difficult to live with (Schwartz’s childhood friends called her Lady Macbeth). Harry often abandoned the family home for periods and in 1923 packed up for good, moving to Chicago. Afterwards, worried that Delmore was becoming a ‘violin’ of his mother’s ‘sick emotions’, he offered to buy his son from Rose for ...”

“... contribution brief: he had not sold God short and even allowing for the saxophone solo and the old lady currently in full, if tiny, voice it had never ceased to be a church service. Treacher had come along hoping to find Father Jolliffe a bit of a clown and over-anxious to please. There had been no evidence of that and he deserved credit. Canon Treacher folded ...”

“... miner, now the Labour councillor for East Worksop on Bassetlaw District Council, and a dinner lady at a Worksop school, Entwistle was intelligent, well-mannered and conformable. The family were said to keep themselves very much to themselves. As such dull but clever children do, Neil shone at school: his teachers at Valley Comprehensive remembered him as ...”

“... she would pull the cords and the cloth would slide back from these paintings and there they were: Lady Una Troubridge with a monocle in her eye; Radclyffe Hall in a marvellous hunting outfit with a terrific hunting hat. It was the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts.Barney walked round the room telling Capote ...”

“... hand, he probably had a clear picture of the framed magazine picture on Gregor’s wall (‘a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer’) and the ‘cool, leather sofa’ and the cigarettes and the textile samples. No matter how you showed the ...”

“... from the Vita Nuova – ‘Ladies, the end and aim of my love was but the salutation of that lady of whom I conceive that you are speaking’ – with a fragment of some lost ‘popular song’: I want someone to treat me rough. Give me a cabman. The assiduous editor has found no source for this and perhaps it needs none. It makes a calculated bathos ...”

“... The effect is damaging when, for example, he quotes the 1842 version of two stanzas of ‘the Lady of Shallot’ as showing ‘the new direction’ of Tennyson’s 1832 poems, or says that the fourth stanza of the poem ‘re-opens the ambiguities of the third’, which it may do in 1842, but not in 1832, where, besides the changes in the text, the order ...”

“... and leaps’ and ‘manic crushes’ who was interested in the ‘great Boswell’ (so called by a Lady Lemon in 1792). At one point in the history of his elations and depressions Lowell was heard to speak of a trip to Scotland in pursuit of his ancestors. And who were they? ‘Oh, you know (looking seriously) – Robert the Bruce and James Boswell.’ Whether ...”

“... in the hand could be an aid to devotion. Mr Kensit’s reply was: ‘Madam, you are dressed as a lady. Please behave as one.’ Whether he was rebuking her for speaking at all or for daring to have views about her own private worship is not clear, but it is a remark to push a feminist, or indeed anybody, to extremes. It is one of the skills of 1900 that it ...”

“... conceits, including the notion that only when heaven and earth are conflated will he and his lady be able to join in love: Unless the giddy heaven fall, And earth some new convulsion tear; And, us to join, the world should all Be cramp’d into a planisphere. ‘Cramp’d into a planisphere’ is as good a way of describing the universe of love in ...”

“... New Statesman). Holtby was a mainstay of the magazine and enjoyed plotting editorial strategy with Lady Rhondda and holidaying with her in the South of France; yet in Testament of Friendship, journalism is continually portrayed as a distraction from the nobler art of novel-writing, with Brittain remarking that some of those weeping so copiously at Winifred’s ...”

“... Moral Lesson to Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale, Now Mrs Hester Lynch Piozzi presented in the figure of Lady Fantasma Tunskull the vanity, hypocrisy, false sentiment, selfishness and cruelty towards children with which the former Mrs Thrale was now associated. She blamed Baretti for that as well. Hints in Johnson’s and Mrs Thrale’s journals of a shared interest ...”

“... But we decided to interrogate the mortician instead. Who was in the coffin? ‘A white-haired old lady.’ But what was she wearing? ‘A pants suit.’ But what kind of pants suit? ‘Purple lurex.’ It was enough. There may have been many white-haired old ladies in pants suits being laid to rest in Miami that morning, but only my mother was in purple ...”