“... degree of choice for most aspiring politicians. He was a member of an unfashionable college – Lady Margaret Hall – rather than one of the prestigious old foundations like Balliol or Christ Church, but through sheer ability and a good deal of networking, including the assiduous cultivation of Johnson, he managed to become president of the Oxford ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Gonzago’s wife has vowed that if her husband dies she will never remarry, with the words ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks,’ she is ‘nonplussed, and shows no sign of recognising the likeness of herself in the Player Queen’. I have never yet seen a Gertrude this stupid in performance; more often her reply is played as a defiant ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”