“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has denounced Henry James and the semicolon. Among Roth’s mouthpieces is the oracular cleaning lady Faunia Farley in The Human Stain, who corrects the notion of the protagonist, a former professor, that sex is about more than sex: ‘No, it’s not. You just forgot what sex is.’ Her name is Faunia, see. Roth and McCarthy’s best novels may be as good as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were eight. The seminarist’s eyes widen in alarm at this dangerous train of thought. At the Our Lady of Purification Church in the old fishing port of Kollum, I ask the priest, Fr Alphonse, about the original church, which has records going back to the sixth century. Is it perhaps under the present building, which dates from the 1980s? Might there be ...”

“... of Abydos, Lara, and the rest of the Eastern tales that followed. The lionisation, the affair with Lady Caroline Lamb that succeeded it, and the affair with his half-sister which succeeded that, the marriage, the separation, the exile: all depend to an incalculable extent on the success of Childe Harold. Most of what we do know about the way the manuscript ...”

“... a genially tolerant figure and a strong Europhile, has some surprising supporters, including Lady Olga Maitland. Portillo, for his part, has significant support on the Left of the Party. Tony Blair and Charles Kennedy would no doubt prefer Portillo, and at the moment, the Euro remains a real obstacle to Clarke’s leadership, unless the Party can ...”

“... In such poems as ‘A Song of the English’, ‘The Houses (A Song of the Dominions)’, ‘Our Lady of the Snows’, ‘The Native-Born’, and many others, one can see Kipling trying with a certain desperation to resolve the conflict between his enthusiasm for the world-straddling greatness of Britain, on the one hand, and, on the other, for everything ...”

“... that Joyce was treated ‘quite regally’. Margaret Joyce, too, began to broadcast, and Lord and Lady Haw-Haw moved into a swanky flat on Kastanien-Allee. Joyce remained the key presence in the Berlin Rundfunk even after Goebbels had begun to wonder, with the Soviet Union and the US having joined the war, whether Haw-Haw’s ‘biting criticism’ was the ...”

“... we knew Mr Benjamin to have been Jewish, we made no remark and left this declaration to his lady companion. She never said anything of the kind and let them take the body of the defunct. The refugees’ clothes were set out to dry, they retired for a brief rest, and well after dark in a pummelling thunderstorm they were taken to catch the night train ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”