“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... though I wasn’t listening.’ He has a sharp, disillusioned eye: ‘I stood behind one fat lady … The biggest wart on her neck was covered by the clasp of her necklace.’ In the spa town, Pechorin befriends a like-minded doctor called Werner. The two men, Pechorin thinks with self-satisfaction, share a cold egotism: ‘Sad things are funny to ...”

“... responding to, and in my mind’s eye (altered and confirmed) I see a small, nondescript old lady going bravely about her business. There are other signs that I am no longer young, but the ah-bless is the most open and public. Yet my Swedish correspondent said she found me ‘sad and pathetic’ for describing myself as old. So that’s me told, every ...”