“... Lady Elizabeth Foster sits beneath a tree and avoids our gaze, lost, it seems, in thought. Behind her the Italian countryside is bathed in a warm autumnal light that sets off the delicate white and cream of her softly ruffled dress and fashionable Leghorn hat. She too is fair, her pink and white complexion carefully shaded from the afternoon sun ...”

“... ferocious: ‘In the van of battle, all is struck down before you. With your strength, my lady, teeth can crush flint.’ What does Enheduanna have in common with Hrotsvit, a noblewoman and poet writing lives of the saints in Latin in tenth-century Saxony? Hrotsvit hopes that ‘the Giver of my talent all the more be justly praised through me, the ...”

“... thoughts – and lots and lots of love and all good wishes, you dearest dear brave creature.’ Lady Londonderry was one of the hostesses whose parties added political zest to the London season. The biggest party was in Londonderry House at the Hyde Park Corner end of Park Lane, an 18th-century building enlarged by the Wyatts and possessed of the biggest ...”

“... the area had been staked out). This complicated phone trail eventually led to a man called Robert Lady. Lady was the CIA’s man in Milan, formally a US vice-consul, but well known to the police as a spy. He was so in love with Italy that he had decided to spend his imminent retirement in a luxurious villa near Turin. When ...”

“... of the first things we were taught was that Henry VI founded Eton, his “College Roiall of oure Lady Eton”, in the year 1440.’ So says Mark Dixon in An Eton Schoolboy’s Album. He may or may not have learned much history, but somewhere along the line Dixon, who left Eton in 1980, has learned how to write in an entertaining and elegant way. I find it ...”

“... like the other show written by Jenji Kohan, Weeds, which was also taken up with a pretty white lady who finds herself a making an indecent living out of selling illegal drugs. But OITNB wasn’t compelling enough to make me fire up the Apple TV thing to see the rest of the first series. Yet, the talk got louder: it wasn’t just witty and warm (always a ...”

“... of its precocious 12-year-old narrator, Simons Manigault. Simons is the only son of a literary lady who wants him to become a writer (hence the elaborate diction and distended vocabulary – she’s had him reading Faulkner), and his narrative is presented as an ‘assignment’ he is writing for her. Near the beginning of the novel, he describes falling ...”

“... were imperfectly suited. Her Frenchness was a snag. ‘Sir Walter lived as happily with his lady as might be supposed capable for one whose tastes and habits were so essentially dissimilar.’ A dodgy sentence, but one that rings true. Lady Scott appears in a better light when Hogg, in his parlour mode of loveable ...”

“... as opinion surveys have shown, Thatcherism never took hold of the British people even when the lady herself was in power. If anything, indeed, public opinion moved to the left during the Thatcher era. Lady Thatcher’s unique feat of winning three general elections in a row was thus more the result of a divided ...”

“... called fin’amor, was firmly extramarital. A knight or cleric professed to adore an unavailable lady, offering her the ‘service’ of songs sung in her honour, tournaments fought under her colours and obedience to her every whim. In return she might deign to reward him with a tender glance, a smile, a kiss, or even – provided that secrecy could be ...”

“... Numbers, Deuteronomy), posits an original and originating ‘master’ who is in fact female: a lady of the court of King Rehoboam, slack-wristed son and heir of Solomon. And why not? Dealing with an era so distant and ill-documented as ancient Israel, we can find no firm evidence either for or against that supposition. If all the same we find it ...”

“... his long list of illustrious acknowledgments (again, I’ve only seen an advance proof) includes Lady Eccles and Anthony and Lady Violet Powell. Murray began the book when he was 16, still at Eton, and finished it a week before starting at Oxford. (Much of the work was done while teaching at a remote prep school in ...”

“... she said to the presenters. The programme nets an audience of 11.9 million people, so as the lady approached the front of the stage – a lady undeniably frumpy, gauche, and dowdy – she was already in the process of achieving her dream. The judges were smirking, the audience was baying for blood, and everybody was ...”

“... hand in Powys’s rise to fame, having recommended him to David Garnett, another fantasist, whose Lady into Fox had been a great success in 1922. There seems to have been a market in those years for a peculiarly English brand of fantasy, but any imputation of parochialism must fail: Garnett was a man of wide interests, who wrote poems in French as well as ...”

“... flight Of stairs which lead to the door of her fine house, The other on the third, the very old lady Stands, staring dead ahead, clutching the railings. At one point in my tortuous, interrupted walk Linking up all the second-hand bookshops I know of In this city which I visit too rarely, I pass by her, guiltily, without speaking. 2. Where a few paths ...”