“... at Macy’s, ‘mankind thriving in their solitudes in shoes’. Here he stumbles on a bag-lady living in ‘a niche between buildings with tin canopy/shelter from cold rain’, surrounded by pots and pans and plates, on her head a ‘motheaten rabbit-fur hat’, her teeth no more than ‘hard flat flowers arranged around her gums. Of course it is ...”

“... educate young men. And so it went on. When Parliament gave women the right to stand for election, Lady Sandhurst was unseated from the London County Council by an opponent who claimed that, not being a person, she could not be ‘a fit person of full age’. But when a Miss Cobden was elected and waited till the time for challenge was past before taking her ...”

“... the distance. The brief bio announced he was ‘the youngest son of Lieut-Col. Aymer Maxwell and Lady Mary Percy, fifth daughter of the 7th Duke of Northumberland’. Bit posh for my taste, I thought, but I opened it nonetheless, and read the first lines: ‘I sit in a pitch-pine panelled kitchen-living room, with an otter asleep upon its back among the ...”

“... hands were filthy and his trousers caked in mud and diesel. The flat had once belonged to an old lady. Traces of a domestic life that had long ceased to exist were scattered around the room and mingled with the possessions of the new occupiers. A mother of pearl ashtray sat next to a pile of walkie-talkies. Small china figurines stood on top of the TV next ...”

“... In 1931, he refused her permission to put Harold Nicolson on air to discuss Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but offered a prototypical BBC fudge: Nicolson would instead be allowed to tell listeners about the decision. Matheson resigned from the corporation.Her book Broadcasting, written shortly afterwards, displays the fascinated speculation ...”

“... McCann remembers that about a week after Ranger Best was shot I argued on a street corner with a lady who had been vigorously supporting the ‘peace campaign’, in the course of which I alleged against her that, ‘I suppose if you knew who did it you would give the names to the police.’ At this she stalked away saying that she had been trying to conduct ...”

“... for supper, and an endless hostOf syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies,And other such lady-like luxuries –You could wish you were ...”

“... on leisure, at the Battenburg, a gambling club on Goswell Road, but found it sadly dull. ‘A lady at the piano strummed waltzes’ while ‘women of the unfortunate class’ engaged in some ‘mild dancing’.Duckworth​ also attended church services. Although Booth’s final seven volumes were headed ‘Religious Influences’, they included evidence ...”

“... Fencibles (for whom he collected and sometimes wrote such songs as ‘Nine Inch Will Please a Lady’), he laid the foundations of his own cult. So ridiculed and loathed by 20th-century Scottish intellectuals, Burns suppers are not a betrayal of the bard, but merely a damagingly partial continuation of his legacy. The prominence of Burns among icons of ...”

“... private conversation of the family. Gates thinks that she may have been Jane’s replacement as lady’s maid, serving the Wheeler household in 1856 and escaping the following year. John Hill Wheeler kept a diary, parts of which are intact; a theatre-goer, he records seeing John Wilkes Booth in the part of Shylock, and thinking him a very promising ...”

“... about the fracas, she says. ‘There was always part of him that gloried in his reputation as a lady-killer, the sinful, depraved Don Juan. The mad, bad, dangerous-to-know sadist.’ I now wonder if part of his ardent embrace of Look Back in Anger – ‘I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger,’ he memorably pronounced ...”

“... We never, that I recall, filled them in on who Virginia Woolf was or put them in the picture about Lady Ottoline Morrell; Sapper, Buchan, Osbert Sitwell – to the boys these must have been names only, familiar to the principal players, John Gielgud and Paul Eddington, but as remote to the rest of the cast as historical figures in Shakespeare. This omission ...”

“... but also with gender was too disturbing. In one episode, Macunaíma dresses up as a ‘French lady’:So then Macunaíma borrowed from the boarding house madam some pairs of froufrou things, a rouge machine, a silk-stockings machine, a slip machine scented with sacaca bark, a girdle machine fragrant with lemongrass, a décolleté machine spritzed with ...”

“... Trump was better at pandering to the mythology of the patriarchy. Men didn’t need to listen to a lady lawyer lecturing them about how to live their lives, nor did they need a social safety net. A real man didn’t care about the minimum hourly wage or Medicaid. He was an independent agent. His windfall was always just around the corner, with the right crypto ...”

“... allowing him to participate in romanticism and rebellion and to fall in love with a wild Scots lady, and then bringing him safely home to a hereditary estate and marriage with an English rose. The formula is more perfunctory in Pushkin but also more effective in the detail of the text. Grinev’s efforts at achievement in the romantic style are pointedly ...”