“... more farouche than ever and more suspicious of patronage, refusing to visit the Sitwells, dodging Lady Ottoline Morell, intimidating Virginia Woolf, but in the fire-lit bookshop, with Alida’s dogs and Harold Monro’s cat, there was no need for defensiveness. During the Twenties she acquired, also, an elderly beau. Sydney Cockerell, the director of the ...”

“... on the road through Savoy at an inn with only one bedroom, has to sleep next to a travelling lady in beds ‘that stood parallel, and so very close to each other as only to allow space for a small wicker chair betwixt them’. Sterne’s narrative breaks off in the middle of the night (just as Yorick has ‘accidentally’ stretched out his arm and ...”

“... to have befallen the English people. Dorril also confuses those two frightful Fascist moneybags, Lady Pearson and Viscountess Downe. Mosley’s headquarters, the Black House, cannot have been simultaneously in Chelsea and at 232 Battersea Park Road (in fact it was next to the Duke of York’s Barracks, not the Duke of Wellington’s). There is also a little ...”

“... a passage in Aurora Leigh where Romney patronises the almost self-taught Aurora for writing ‘lady’s Greek,/Without the accents’. This is just the start of a complaint about women who want to be clever and poetical when they should be supporting men who are trying to improve the world: ‘Work man, work woman, since there’s work to do,/In this ...”

“... out of ten’ they would be effective. If they didn’t work, she advised him to return with his lady friend and that it would cost him $200 (around $5000 today). Instead, he returned two weeks later with the police and an arrest warrant. ‘You’ve brought quite a party with you,’ Restell said.She hired an aggressive lawyer – Orlando T. Stewart, a ...”

“... that it was the only way a woman could be elected, she had built her image as a Thatcher-like Iron Lady, not only supporting the Iraq war, but also identifying with various military and defence issues. Assuming she would be running against the right, never imagining a challenge from the left, Clinton was not prominently identified with any progressive ...”

“... or even a car; and I don’t have a job (belletrist). If a sensible, attractive, middle-aged lady came across me on a dating website she would immediately think to herself: feckless, disturbed. Also, loser. The panic about clearing out the house wasn’t the only thing keeping me up. I had a dread of losing the place; a very real, primal dread in the pit ...”

“... appeal for him. They had neither the coarse sexuality of a work-girl nor the glamour of a society lady. Another hindrance was his difficulty in seeing any woman as his equal; or, more precisely, if he had an equal relation – with Clara Collet, for example – it seemed to exclude a romantic attachment. This kind of analysis is characteristic of Delany’s ...”

“... has much to recommend it: I spend my days footling in a job I care nothing about, a curate among lady-clerks; I evade all responsibility, familial, professional, emotional, social, not even saving much money or helping my mother. I look around me & I see people getting on, or doing things, or bringing up children – and here I am in a kind of vacuum ...”

“... the first floor. During the Russian march the day before someone had come by and warned the door lady that if they didn’t remove the Tymoshenko sign, next time they’d burn the whole building ...”

“... between The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy and Canaan (1996). The three ‘Hymns to our Lady of Chartres’ which concluded Hill’s 1985 Collected Poems are in this volume extended to 21, as though retrospectively to bridge this lacuna. The continuities across the work are hard to describe without simplification, but it helps when reading Hill to ...”

“... in the sensations of young, vulnerable women wandering alone in the gloom. In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James sends Isabel Archer boldly marching by herself through the ‘thick brown air’ from Euston to Piccadilly. Corton, however, suggests that the fog is ‘a metaphorical representation of this lack of light in her life, the obscurity of her ...”

“... beloved daughter. This was crucially linked to the birth of Pierre. Louise discovered as an old lady what she had unwittingly known as a toddler. In the early days of her analysis, she often calls herself a ‘goody-goody’. She had hidden her jealousy under a determination to be best. She had tried to become in every way the most successful and favourite ...”

“... an early age to live with the childless Mansfields at Kenwood as a companion to their great-niece Lady Elizabeth Murray, who had lived with them since the death of her mother. Zoffany’s double portrait now hanging in Scone Palace, painted circa 1780 when Dido was in her late teens, shows two elegant young women with different skin colours but similar ...”

“... in many fields. Educated Chinese women often qualify for the obnoxious category ‘leftover lady’: career women whose opportunity to marry has passed. There is still a tendency to condescend to single women and see them as failures, but many brilliant ‘leftover’ women are glad to see that their parents are slowly learning to respect their ...”