“... loyalty to her minister. But she demurred. ‘At the end of the day, I answer to the little lady at the end of the Mall.’ That reply confirmed that the United Kingdom is still essentially a monarchical structure. Not in terms of direct royal intervention, but as a polity in which power flows from the top down. The idiotic doctrine of parliamentary ...”

“... refused to pursue it in the way they wanted, by doing ‘something else outrageous’, to use Lady Ottoline’s phrase. On the contrary, with apparent meekness he agreed to be classified as unfit and sent to Craiglockhart Hospital, where he had his famous meetings with Owen and with the man who was to be his new guru, the psychiatrist ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is that Britten had the last laugh. In the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, I once observed an old lady, buried in furs and hung about with priceless jewellery, peer impassively through a lorgnette at Egon Schiele’s drawings of women masturbating. The rituals of the Aldeburgh festival played out a similar game of double standards. It is a game, perhaps, that ...”

“... They did not stop her from carrying on with what she had to do to support herself (working as a lady’s companion, a seamstress, a schoolmistress, a governess, a writer) or from making bold efforts to protect others from harm or what she saw as harm. As a child she slept outside her mother’s bedroom door, thinking (‘mistakenly, or with ...”

“... callous behaviour of the river party that had left Denis Anson to drown. The party had included Lady Diana Manners (later to marry Duff Cooper) and Margot’s stepson and daughter-in-law, Raymond and Katharine Asquith. Two years later, when Violet and her husband ‘Bongie’ Bonham Carter were laughing about Lloyd George’s behaviour, Margot was reminded ...”

“... described in James’s novels. It is to her that he recounts such triumphs as a ‘few days with Lady Low’ in Dorset, for, proud of her pedigree as a Wadsworth, and a distant connection to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Isabel harboured hopes that her gifted son might restore some of the ancestral respectability squandered by her wastrel father, whose ...”

“... and felt mildly ashamed of this, guilty that I couldn’t always remember which elderly lady was which. Then I realised that I wasn’t necessarily imposing my own priorities. If the mechanism of making art is the same as the mechanism of dreaming, then the primary processes are displacement and condensation – and perhaps Philip Hensher needs ...”

“... bring with him five or six horses loaden with sacks as the farmers bring their corn; and when his lady comes in her coach to our shops, it must be followed by a car loaden with Mr. wood’s money … But what the bankers will do I cannot tell. For I am assured, that some great bankers keep by them forty thousand pounds in ready cash to answer all ...”

“... with a preposterous rich smoothie who at first seemed like a figment of her imagination. This lady was like Madame Bovary on Marmite. Women watching the programme could see themselves amusingly displayed in their wistfulness, lack of assurance, uselessness, and lack of direction. (The family didn’t seem able to educate its lunkish sons, although the ...”

“... late poems suggest: always both. The speaker of ‘Lesbos’, ‘The Jailer’, ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ couldn’t be more of a victim, but she expresses herself as if no one has told her that. The Ariel voice makes something glorious of a woman’s always abject – divorced or not – position in the world. ‘Don’t talk to me about the world ...”

“... learning’ given ‘men maintain that the mind of women can learn only a little,’ de Pizan’s Lady Reason responds that ‘the opposite of their opinion is true … if it were customary to send daughters to school like sons, and if they were then taught the natural sciences, they would learn as thoroughly and understand the subtleties of all the arts and ...”

“... darting birdlike gaze comes to rest in the end on old clichés – sad ones or happy. Like some lady in a Victorian novel or sentimental melodrama she would say to Leonard, ‘Do you ever think me beautiful now?’ in order to hear him say: ‘The most beautiful of ...”