“... seeming inability to cast the female lead. ‘I hear you’re having a problem with the leading lady,’ Cohn is supposed to have said to Ray. ‘I don’t have a problem,’ Ray said. ‘I just don’t want Ginger Rogers.’ (He meant the real Ginger Rogers, who was on offer, though it might as well be a catch-all term for the opposite of a femme ...”

“... an automatic pistol. The prime minister wrote gleefully that since Miss Lamont was ‘a Scottish lady in her prime and of placid temperament’, she was ‘not at all taken aback’, and merely explained the problem. The Russian thereupon closed the offending curtain and locked his door. His host observed that the episode ‘reveals one aspect of the gulf ...”

“... to indulge but also to inhabit these memories. Anna Klumpke, aged 32 (Bonheur was 67), was a model lady companion: an attentive art student, musically gifted and willing to record injunctions and reminiscences. She was even willing to physically assume the place left vacant by Micas, moving into her yellow bedroom and accepting her watch, rings and tokens of ...”

“... in short not one window, but a million,’ Henry James wrote in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady), which makes the characters who occupy it tenants of a sort. Tenants can be unruly, do damage to the fixtures, take over the place. You can see why a writer might want to tame them. In Cortázar’s ‘Casa Tomada’, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall ...”

“... undoubtedly unusual. And it had been on a ‘thank you’ visit to Chile in 1994 that the unironic lady had experienced the first fainting fit and collapse that presaged her ultimate decline and rancorous retirement. The picture is completed by the absolute gutlessness of British Labour in its second incarnation, and by Jack Straw’s decision to send the old ...”

“... barred from pregnancy. It is birthed in a moment of agony and of intimacy with the divine:Queen, lady! For youI have given birth toit: what I sang to youat dead of night, leta lamenter repeat atmidday.Enheduana’s ‘Exaltation’ captures the birth of eloquence, but also its miscarriage. Earlier in the poem, desperate for her petition to be heard by the ...”

“... most striking mountains – ‘wears her light shawl of mist, playful yet reserved, she is a lady who one can be sure would never travel to St Moritz to go shopping.’ He is unashamedly bourgeois in Paris too. ‘Scribbled at the Jeu de Paume’ is a sketch of what was then the most significant collection of Impressionist paintings, and of the Eiffel ...”

“... grandmother designed the sensational beetle-wing costume in which Ellen Terry appeared as Lady Macbeth. Committed Liberals in politics, they had also produced a number of distinguished lawyers. Richard, with his combination of tweed, brogues and a job in the Foreign Office, his taste for gold-tipped cigarettes and a subscription to an anarchist ...”

“... chapters are about her posthumous meanings and her adoption by everyone from François Hollande to Lady Gaga. Looseley, who teaches contemporary French culture at the University of Leeds, is too much given to obfuscating seminar jargon – the ‘dimensions of language and location … provide an intercultural optic which is possibly unique to those working in ...”

“... in the early 16th century, created a series of portraits of Mary Magdalene as a contemporary great lady, sitting reading or playing the lute (examples by the same artist showing her with pen, ink, ruler, sand caster and blotter – surely some of the earliest depictions of a woman writing – are sadly not included). The striking Salon group portrait by Jean ...”

“... bought them and lots of other fabulous items, ready for what she planned to be her UK debut as Lady Lazarus, rising from the wreckage of her family: her stepfather, her mother and her grandmother had all died within a few years. She must have been both liberated and devastated. The important thing, though, was that the deaths had left her rich.Acker’s ...”

“... into the rain. The Tube was crowded at Bank, everyone keeping themselves to themselves, the Indian lady in sandals and socks, the young man with earphones and jagged hair lost in beats not his own; the lady across from me with the Aztec necklace, the man in the North Face jacket, the schoolchild looking out anxiously for her ...”

“... with another woman. No wonder figures like Wyndham Lewis couldn’t take it – the ‘Jewish lady’ was a ‘highbrow clown’. (Antisemitism was an undeniable theme in her reception by the more talented modernists too: in Eliot’s fear of her work instituting a ‘new barbarian age’ or Ezra Pound claiming that ‘Gertie Stein … writes yittish wit ...”

“... lord’, controlling the Express empire, as well as a member of the coalition cabinet. Soon Lady Diana herself would take the Beaver’s shilling and write a column in the Sunday Express until the editor managed to suppress it (‘the veriest twaddle’). This snapshot – one of many in Charles Williams’s biography – reveals two factors in ...”

“... in India Conquered: the Brighton Pavilion was not built by Prince Albert; the viceroy who was Lady Dorothy Macmillan’s grandfather and whose portrait gazed down on Harold Macmillan was Lansdowne, not Dufferin. But in general, Wilson’s thesis stands up to examination, not least to the self-examination of the collectors who sweltered through the hot ...”