“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an editorial entitled ‘A Mess instead of Music’, attacking Shostakovich’s new opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, for its modernist tendencies (known in the Soviet Union as ‘formalism’). Lina was worried, and several of their friends warned them that the anti-formalism campaign was likely to spread. But it was too late to draw back ...”

“... Fanny’s triumphant debut temporarily rescued the family fortunes. Accompanied by her mother as Lady Capulet and her father as Mercutio, Fanny’s Juliet was an overwhelming, if not quite universal success. But most critics agreed that her performance was more than worthy of her name; and in her first season alone she managed to earn almost triple what her ...”

“... approaching from a distance, ‘as in this street in Paris’, with ‘a dog and a well-dressed lady standing upright next to a melancholic gentleman’. The way the city had been overwhelmed by the river may well have seemed charming, though only because of the scenes on offer. The sight of the boulevard St Germain transformed at its northern end into a ...”

“... that was totally relaxed about people who become filthy rich; they are now Sir Harold Evans and Lady Evans CBE. Even in his eighties, Harry hankers after public life, although his recent interventions have not been happy, including his latest effusion in the Guardian, in which he insisted that ‘Israel is not an “occupying power” in Gaza,’ even if ...”

“... Franklin in 1848; the hunt for him, thanks in no small part to the tireless lobbying of his widow, Lady Jane, soon came to supplant the search for the northwest passage as the primary purpose of voyages to the Arctic. Lambert argues, fairly convincingly, that by the time of Franklin’s voyage the search for the passage was itself a crowd-pleasing pretext, and ...”