“... Isadora had done well at the turn of the century, perhaps because she made English people think of Lady Hamilton’s ‘postures’, offering the same sort of naughtily Grecian, allegedly high-minded self-exposure that it was fine to watch from a certain emotional distance. Graham’s convulsed torso and odd gestures doubtless aroused unwelcome personal ...”

“... historical accounts of it are sparse; one of its few chroniclers claimed that ‘the Spanish Lady inspired no songs, no legends, no work of art.’ There are, in fact, two or three short stories about it – reclaimed for lit crit by Barbara Fass Leavy in To Blight With Plague – plus a couple of book-length historical accounts and a handful of articles ...”

“... and satchel posed unforeseen difficulties. It would look suspicious to arrive at a hotel with a lady and baggage, then sit for who knows how many hours in the lobby with her and wait for a message from a Mr Smith. On the other hand, I couldn’t afford the luxury of renting a room for merely a few hours. And what about Zosia? Was I to take a double room for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wars have been lost there.’ ‘England is the most class-ridden country under the sun.’ ‘The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Goering’s bombing planes.’‘The lady in the Rolls-Royce car’ was an old-fashioned phrase, from the 1940s. But it wasn’t an entirely obsolete ...”

“... 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 ...”