“... 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 ...”

“... own mixture of knowingness and innocence. Without it, there might have been no The Portrait of a Lady, no Moulin Rouge, no The Others, no accepting an Oscar for her maudlin act with a prosthetic nose as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. By portraying a starlet so cleverly, Kidman acted her way out of any assumption that she herself was nothing but a starlet. By ...”

“... best that was ever dreamed,’ he chortled over a night-time’s romp with the delectable Lady Castlemaine, another of Charles’s mistresses. Only masturbating in church occasioned any qualms. ‘God forgive,’ he scribbled into his diary after a sermon spent mentally fornicating with a friend’s teenage daughter. In May 1667, 18 months after the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the matter. My status was never questioned. All the wives surrendered to my charm. I was a great lady, you know?Rami remains confused. ‘But then, how does the relationship work?’ ‘What relationship, my dear? What are you talking about?’ Chiziane’s prose​ alternates between a dramatic, high-octave style – often when Rami is suffering – and a ...”

“... was legendary. She refused to visit her most loyal courtiers when they were dying. One old lady in waiting is said to have actually died at Clarence House, just before one of the queen mother’s famous lunches under the cedar tree in the garden. Her body was shunted into a side room and HM was not informed until the lunch was over, so as not to spoil ...”