“... due measure, just measure. Double standards were no standards at all. The scales held by Lady Justice on top of the Old Bailey express both unbiased scales and an unbiased weigher. (This Justice, atypically, is not blindfolded because she is taken to personify fairness.) God kept weights and measures in his bag, but in human society the objects ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at her departure. Chalked up on a wall in Derry is the possibly ambivalent ‘Iron Lady, rust in peace.’ This paper was born at the time, 1979, when she became prime minister, having won her election as Tory leader, a post she’d gained over the dead bodies of many of the party’s wise heads. It did not take very long to see that papers of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... broke down altogether when I entered the lofty gallery where the blessed goddess of beauty, Our Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. I lay prostrate at her feet for a long time, and I wept so bitterly that it would have melted a heart of stone. And indeed the goddess did look down pitifully upon me, yet at the same time so hopelessly as if she were trying ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... stiff and virginal, stood two almost empty bottles of brandy and gin. Carlos finished off the lady’s gin, and her hard bed was left as turbulent and disorderly as a battlefield. Each is more literal than the other at times. Pinheiro and Stevens keep the mountain (‘montão’) of bibles, and lose the nest (‘ninho’) of the same; generally stick ...”

“... Tappan declared, as he and his followers stomped out of the annual meeting, ‘for a lady to sit behind closed doors with gentlemen’). Tappan lived the wild life of a 19th-century evangelical businessman: he went broke in 1827, saw anti-abolitionist mobs sack his store and burn his mansion in 1834, and failed again in 1837 (losing a million ...”

“... the winter in Yalta, which provides the background for one of his most famous stories, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. In a Russian-Jewish bookstore owned by Isaac Sinani, a member of the Karaite sect (the Karaites refuse the rabbinical tradition), he met Maxim Gorky, whose early stories he admired, and Ivan Bunin, with whom he became quite intimate ...”

“... pages later we learn that she hasn’t. She is Maria da Paz, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s current lady friend; he has been avoiding her and thinking of ending the relationship. This wasn’t what we expected. Not only does he have a girlfriend: he’s even cruel to her. This contradictoriness, the cruelty disguised by the meek exterior, has made him a ...”

“... We don’t see this quality emerge unmistakably until he appears dressed as a gun-toting old lady with a funny Southern accent in The Missouri Breaks (1976), but the hint of androgyny was surely always there. This is some distance from Bosworth’s claim that the young Brando ‘presented the ordinary American guy to the public’. Unless of course the ...”

“... presumably funded by the Board of Agriculture, which bought Vatersay from the absentee owner, Lady Gordon Cathcart. Among the gaunt masonry, brown and black and ruddy cattle are grazing with their calves, on smooth sward that makes everything seem spaced out and unnaturally distinct, the cattle a blood-link to the people of Vatersay, the houses memorials ...”

“... account. Then, in the most surprising plot twist so far, Koizumi called on his one-time leading lady Makiko Tanaka to rebut, with documentary evidence, a charge by two weekly magazines that she had diverted to her own account the state-paid salaries of an unspecified number of secretaries who were employed by her family-owned bus firm. Considering the vast ...”