“... 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 ...”

“... has a special destiny waiting for her. The title, and epigraph, link her with that superior young lady, Alice. Stella’s favourite reading is Grimm, from which we are presumably intended to infer that she is an ugly duckling. But just how the metamorphosis will happen is left obscure. The novel ends with her returning to Skelf with the ever-pregnant ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... widely advertised and practised, even if there was no certainty in it. And in the very next scene, Lady Macbeth counsels her husband on how to arrange his face: ‘Your face, my thane, is as a book, where men/May read strange matters. To beguile the time,/Look like the time. Bear welcome in your eye.’As a sign of what’s inside, the face has pride of ...”

“... his 18th birthday, for example, he records a discussion about capital punishment with the aunt (Lady Mary Agatha Russell) who had in his childhood taught him English history – from a Russellian viewpoint, of course. Of course Auntie thinks, as women almost always do, principally, of the effect of punishment on the man after committing the crime, rather ...”

“... for example, Bate is sidetracked into an unhelpful fantasy about the true identity of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets (poems which Bate also discussed in a deeply unconvincing Sunday Telegraph article headlined ‘Shakespeare Was Straight’), attempting to convict the poet Samuel Daniel’s sister of multiple adultery on circumstantial evidence that ...”

“... who had retired from the diplomatic service in search of something more useful to do. A Quaker lady, who managed a boarding-house on model lines, was helpful partly because, being deaf, she always sat at the front and rebuked any speaker who was not loud enough for her to hear. There were problems, four hundred miles from London, in getting speakers for ...”

“... the Washington Times). Wanting to ‘let Reagan be Reagan’, Regan battled with the first lady to control the President’s schedule. But Nancy Reagan, as everyone now knows, had a trump in the Presidential protection game, a ‘friend’ who had access to the stars. The President’s wife has come in for considerable ridicule because she, like so ...”

“... the social comedies Hollywood was making at that time – films such as Jack Conway’s Libelled Lady, starring Loy, Harlow, Powell and Tracy. I do feel that with his favourite director Thomson loses his usual magnificent asringency. I wish he would see that Jean Renoir is only the Auguste Renoir of motion pictures and that the Degas is Buñuel. (The ...”

“... movement’; Mrs Thatcher, one of P.W. Botha’s most carefree allies, is a ‘considerate lady’ – a more fatuous description is hard to imagine. Politicians sit for their ghosted memoirs and authorised biographies, as they would for a portrait or a sculptor’s sketches. But because Mandela’s life has been almost wholly one of public service and ...”

“... printed archive, I was transfixed by these words in the Island Guide to Mingulay: ‘in order that Lady Gordon Cathcart could let the islands of Pabbay, Berneray and Mingulay to a grazing tenant, by her authority “notice has been served on the people on these Islands that they are to leave, and their stock if not cleared off will be seized” ... It is said ...”

“... a chance to make the acquaintance of the infant Rosalind, Portia the toddler and the pre-pubescent Lady Macbeth. But extensive as the ‘improvements’ and revisions and adaptations of Shakespeare have been, from Tate to Aimé Césaire and Tom Stoppard, they have not been carried out in recent years with the same pointed zeal as have the sequels to Austen. In ...”

“... 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 ...”