“... 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 ...”

“... tacit understanding was that Chekhov might have girlfriends to stay, but Masha was to remain the lady of the house. Those that accepted these rules could retain the friendship of both brother and sister: Olga Kundasova, the radical feminist ‘astronomer’, lasted, first as mistress, then as psychiatric patient, finally as friend, for twenty years. Even ...”

“... tells him, ‘I love you more and more every day,’ she can write that Kinnaird ‘told Shelley lady Byron usually called your Wife was in good health and on a visit to Mrs Leigh’. Since Claire knew quite well (he had told her) of Byron’s incestuous passion for his half-sister Augusta Leigh, that sentence is surely a nicely-judged double blow. A few ...”

“... cry of pain at the news of her engagement. Hardly less intriguing are the numerous letters to Lady Louisa de Rothschild, an attractive, bookish (and very rich) woman who shared his intellectual interests far more than his wife did. Characteristic of this relationship is the letter in which he reports how the irreverent preface to his Essays in Criticism ...”

“... a number of Pakistani historians) who allege that Nehru’s intimacy with Lady Mountbatten helped India get a better deal than it deserved when the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 are way off the mark. Credit for that must go to the weak-kneed leaders of the Muslim League. The task facing the first post-independence government was ...”

“... Almighty when rebuking his son, but even the plain-spoken Hotspur, the man who complains that his lady swears ‘like a comfit-maker’s wife’ and ought to use ‘a good mouth-filling oath’, cannot declare ‘By God, I cannot flatter.’ This feature may improve this edition’s chances of becoming the set text at small Baptist colleges in the Bible Belt ...”

“... produced surprises. Not everyone had known that there were quite so many images of a huge, winged lady Dawn raping ephebes, but here they were, page after page of them, or that Sisyphus had been mysteriously involved with Odysseus’ mother, that the first bird to abduct Ganymede was not an eagle but a swan, or that beloved Iolaus was also popular in ...”

“... 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 ...”