“... seemed heavier than it had when he unloaded it that morning. ‘Maybe there is a beautiful young lady in the box,’ an airport official joked. There was, of course, a person in the box. It was Carlos Ghosn, the former chairman of the world’s largest car manufacturer, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi. But nobody knew he’d gone missing yet, and the box, with ...”

“... songs, cut loose from proximate causes, such as ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, ‘Gimme Shelter’, ‘Lady Madonna’. But those were explicit statements compared with later examples. In 1983, Elvis Costello’s poignant ‘Shipbuilding’ (sung by Robert Wyatt) was so sidelong a comment on the human costs and economic benefits of the Falklands War that you had ...”

“... him. Click. ‘A Crime of Manners’. Blurb for a romantic fiction with a cast that includes a Lady Fuddlesby and a parrot called Sir Polly Grey. The hero, Giles, Duke of Winterton, decides to pay attention to an earl’s daughter who has many bountiful charms that the heroine, ‘Henrietta, lacks’. So here is my saint: a woman who, according to the ...”

“... was determined not to let Howells have his way with the stereotype. Instead of an ageing ‘maiden lady’ with the usual ‘disappointment’ in the distant past (‘a date so remote’, in Howells’s formula, ‘that it was only matter of pathetic hearsay, now’), Freeman made Elizabeth Talbert a pretty redhead of 34 with a habit of dressing in pink and a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”