“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pictorial images. The prosecution resorted to this Act because of their failure in the recent Lady Chatterley’s Lover case, brought under the Obscene Publications Act, which admitted the evidence of numbers of expert witnesses where the Vagrancy Act limited this. This strategem was a piece of blatant hypocrisy, in that the terms of the Vagrancy Act ...”

“... the United Kingdom. But an editorial apparatus that tells students how to address a baronet’s lady, and finds time to list the 15 items contained in a typical Victorian dressing-case, should also take the trouble not to encumber Virginia Woolf’s meditation on the ‘mothers who bore 13 children to ministers of religion at St Andrews’ and raised all 13 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”