“... apt one is, sometimes, to say just the thing most mal-à-propos. I was calling not long ago on a lady, whose husband suffers from periodic attacks of madness – so that one would wish to avoid all allusion to so painful a subject: and before I knew what I was saying, I found myself in the middle of a comic story about a madman! This is indeed ...”

“... its downs, and its traps at its ending. The title of the collection derives from The Portrait of a Lady – the moment when Isabel Archer, determined to marry the wrong person, ‘went on, having caught a glimpse, as she thought, of the heroic line and desiring to advance in that direction’ – and Ricks enlists ‘desiring to advance in that direction’ as ...”

“... been a domestic servant). She gave her initial statement to the Metropolitan Police’s first ‘lady assistant’, Eilidh MacDougall, who ran the newly opened Police Home for Women and Girls. MacDougall was the daughter of a barrister, and before joining the police had looked after ‘friendless’ women and girls in Southwark. Part of her job now was to ...”

“... Ours! Not yours to give out as a favour when you’re finished with it. Everything you have, white lady, is already mine. I don’t have to ask.’ This could have been produced by the reader without help from the writer. What the reader hopes to find in a novel set in a turbulent period of recent history is imaginative understanding, not sloganising followed ...”

“... of reflecting or defining the national consciousness; work started very deliberately by Yeats and Lady Gregory when they founded the theatre in 1904. The argument about excellence – that women’s work just isn’t good enough – is incredibly hurtful given that there is so much mediocre work by men around. Theatre is a high-stakes medium. Some of the ...”

“... principal of Hertford College, which was about to vote to admit women. At that point the ‘First Lady’ of Hertford fell silent on the subject, but when Johnson met her at the side of a cricket field and needled her, she told him that ‘no one could be against co-education when you see what lovely young girls we’ve got at Hertford.’ Warnock was also ...”

“... rather staid, old-fashioned concept. So Kraftwerk are a total work of art? Well, these days so are Lady Gaga, and Beyoncé, and Lana Del Rey, among many others.Kraftwerk​ sang the praises of a ‘continent without borders’, and Schütte’s devotion to them is indistinguishable from his feelings about the ‘wider political development of European ...”

“... plenty of the South.The balcony is a favourite image of Rilke’s. In his work – as in ‘Lady on the Balcony’, written on 17 August 1907 – it usually implies aristocratic elevation. And yet ‘The Balcony’ gives the subject a Neapolitan twist: one can readily imagine generations wearing black. The balcony pulls the people together, seems to ...”

“... Woman’; for Virginia Woolf she was a ‘dull impeccable Bostonian’, a ‘rich American snob lady’. Eliot’s ardour, and the reasons for it, passed his contemporaries by.Crawford’s biography restores Eliot’s devotion to view while keeping its object shadowy. His concern is with tracing the way Eliot’s ‘conception’ of Hale joined ...”

“... for the print market. In 1819, Rose Emma Drummond showed a portrait of Hannah Thatcher, ‘a young lady born deaf and dumb’, as the catalogue entry explained gravely, ‘who was presented to Her late Majesty on acquiring the faculty of speech, and the sense of hearing’. Few subjects, Drummond must have known, could have been more perfectly calibrated for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... slaving away or – worse – out of work would have been sufficient to mark you out as a ‘lady’. What could be grander than lounging around upstairs, nibbling at the stock when the fancy took you, brushing out your curls? She and Katie would still spend hour upon hour getting ready to go out – to Cardiff, or to Pontypridd, to some tea-shop, or to ...”

“... undergraduate, ‘Henry’, in the form of a long-enduring tenderness felt by a 50-year-old maiden lady for a married and unlovable Archdeacon. The very ability so to rework her own situation suggests a remarkable detachment, humour and originality: all in all, a literary power well outside anything shown in these journals. Perhaps Barbara Pym merely lacked ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her romancing schoolgirl sister, already established by Elizabeth Jordan as an avid believer in Lady Hermione’s Terrible Secret, rushes up to her and pleads unexpectedly for forgiveness: ‘Lorraine wanted [Billy] to write out exactly what he knew, and he didn’t know anything except about the telegram and how the letter got wuzzled, and I told him I’d ...”