“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hugely exciting. When the day came, Sonya waited at the altar in the Church of the Nativity of Our Lady, close by her home for an hour before Tolstoy appeared. He had realised at the last moment that he had no shirt for the ceremony. Immediately afterwards, they set off for Yasnaya Polyana, his country estate, 120 miles south of Moscow; and a house with no ...”

“... world – a friend of Nicolsons, Lehmanns and Woolfs, who lunched with Eliot, Herbert Read and Lady Ottoline Morrell, and a reviewer in the leading journals. A pamphlet, Twenty Poems, had appeared to much acclaim in 1930, and three years later Poems was published by Faber to strikingly good reviews. ‘Another Shelley speaks in these lines,’ Herbert Read ...”

“... Sexual difference then rears its head, and La Bruyère’s absent-minded hero ‘pays a visit to a lady, and imagines that she is visiting him’, eventually inviting her to stay for supper.The apparent link between hospitality and patriarchy takes Derrida back to the story of Lot, as related in the book of Genesis. Lot is a stranger living in the city of ...”

“... certain things. He felt that to some extent she was playing a part, more court jester than crazy lady. She was always trying to embrace André and didn’t understand his resistance, but then no one had told her that she had been replaced in his life. During one meal by the pool, with André absent, she said that she knew what was the matter with him – he ...”

“... lend its name to the occasion). Foreign adventurers would soon take note; so apparently did Our Lady, who from the beginning had been central to the order’s pride and belief in its mission, but who now no longer delivered them victories. Already her services to Christendom were more urgently required in the Balkans against the growing threat from the ...”

“... combining these in a little volume with an admirable rendering of Lermontov’s ‘The Tambov Lady’, a narrative poem in the Onegin metre which he employs with as much virtuosity as in his previous Pushkin translations. Johnston hopes that poetry can still be ‘authorised to entertain’, and shows that if you are good enough you don’t have to bother ...”

“... circumventing them. At times ‘no mandarin would speak to us – so the office was run by an old lady and a child’, one of her private secretaries remembered. She relied instead on political will, her influence with Wilson and on Lord Goodman, a lawyer and old friend who was quickly co-opted. His presence made her job much easier and a number of people ...”