“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”