“... 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 ...”

“... such a talented field. Back in Manchester, Rubio was throwing a Super Bowl party, but by the time Lady Gaga started singing the national anthem journalists and campaign workers clearly outnumbered New Hampshire voters, who had presumably left to watch the game in a place where they could drink beer. I sat down with a cluster of teenage boys holding little ...”

“... too busy railing against mutinous tenant farmers to make a good manager; ‘as for baldly asking a lady to pay her bill, he would as soon have committed sodomy.’ In consequence, his only guests are genteel old women too cash-strapped or confused to move elsewhere. Once the Major has been absorbed into the hotel, his comic-Kafkaesque engagement comes to an ...”

“... we see Nan? Foley dead and me having an abortion?’      ‘Miss Grania, what a word for a lady to use.’      ‘You’d do it, Nan, but you wouldn’t say it.’Two Days in Aragon was published in 1941, and written in the early days of Keane’s marriage, soon after Sally’s birth. Two years earlier Mamie Cadden, a midwife and backstreet ...”

“... fabulously butch – perhaps the Butchest One of All. She knew it and basked in it, like a big lady she-cat in the sun.Perhaps at some point there will be, too, a better and less routine accounting of her extraordinary cultural significance. Granted, Great Man (or Great Woman) theories of history have been out of fashion for some time now. No single ...”

“... which were an old man, whose name was Prospero, and his daughter Miranda, a very beautiful young lady’ – and calls it ‘proto-Hemingway’; he also claims for her prose ‘the lean authority of the Bible’. In the all too rare moments when Wilson is lost for inspiration, he resorts to dropping in big words: scesis ...”

“... an officer’s name when relating how Dr Lowndes ‘ran away with Major – Major Van Dyce’s lady that year’. That Kipling was well aware of the dangers of his own virtuosity in this direction is shown, I think, by ‘The Finest Story in the World’, which can be read either as a straight account of Kipling’s formula for the story proclaimed by the ...”

“... lifeguard, lumberjack, gas station attendant. He got a few bit parts: an anonymous Saxon in Lady Godiva of Coventry, a baffled lab technician in Revenge of the Creature. One or two of the characters he played actually had names, but it was small-time stuff, and Eastwood said of Ambush at Cimarron Pass that it was ‘even worse than the title’. Then ...”

“... under him at sea, as Dollyrumple-Amilton. While dancing he seemed quite at home with the great lady, laughing and speaking, with a courtly bend, into her ear, though he became formal and submissive during the ceremonies of departure. It struck me that very senior officers, the real thing, and their women got on more easily with subordinates like Archer ...”