“... 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 ...”

“... their wrists and necks, and, on the other, Dolly’s relatives, in particular one frail, tall old lady in a white sari and pince-nez glasses, with pearls at her neck, and all these people looking at each other. Then all the talking died away, there was a curious moment of silence, it was absolute and total, even the birds stopped chirping in the trees. Then ...”

“... off.’ Long before he was demonised by the Victorians, the inventor of the Yahoos and ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ was shown as a self-destroying misanthrope. As Glendinning says, Swift’s death ‘unleashed a spate of speculation and analysis which continues to this day’. Much of it has not been charitable. One of the best things about ...”

“... of it from an incoming Tory government, was important. This time round there was only the visit of Lady Thatcher – probably worth several percentage points on the pro-Home Rule turn-out. In Wales, too, there was a dramatic shift in balance in the 1997 referendum as compared with that of 1979. Though the Welsh Assembly and its area of authority will be much ...”

“... handkerchief. I came back and forth from inspecting a very life-like statue of Mary, Our Lady, in the bedroom next door. My granny was speaking like I’d never heard her do, in a way I found quite frightening. She seemed to trust my mother as far as she was able to, in the way that women who’ve lived in a similar relation to men sometimes do. Each ...”