“... 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 ...”

“... There’s only one naked lady left, going to ruin out there in the fog amid the dahlias and lavender, its pink trumpet flowers wilted and in tatters. There used to be a couple of dozen of them blooming in the yard every August. Not much else was out there in the yard doing much of anything so the ladies made quite a spectacle of themselves, like Rockettes in a dusty frontier town ...”

“... Chelsea Flower Show, the Mail on Sunday ran an interview under the headline: ‘Parents Reveal how Lady Black’s Greed Drove Her’. Her mother and stepfather are nevertheless excused as media ‘innocents’ and are among the small number of the forgiven. Amiel’s book also does a disservice to her as a journalist whose ‘political stuff’ on abortion ...”

“... to as ‘X’ – once adorned him with lace and jewels and took him to Carnevale dressed as ‘a lady of the rococo period. He looked as if he had walked out of a Watteau … and only later was he shocked into regretting his perfection and his innocence.’ These fantasies of the jewelled tomboy projected onto Nijinsky by rich aristocrats continued long ...”

“... in the local newspaper that unto him had been born ‘on Friday, at Mile End Terrace, the Lady of John Dickens, Esq, a son’ ... As an adult, Charles Dickens considered Friday his lucky day. Less tentative than Ackroyd, Kaplan entitles his chapter ‘The Hero of my own Life’. I don’t for a moment think that Ackroyd is copying Kaplan. But they ...”