“... needed money partly because he was keen to find a wife, ‘a nice tight armful of a spirited young lady’ as he put it, ominously enough; and in 1837 he married Linnell’s daughter Hannah, also an artist. The couple set off for a long visit to Italy, burdened by a commission from Linnell to copy frescoes by Michelangelo and Raphael. ‘Italy – especially ...”

“... in fact already moved into the arena. In 1895 a French court had ordered Whistler to hand over to Lady Eden his portrait of her, on the ground that her personality right in it overrode his proprietary right to it, a decision reversed on appeal only when Whistler obliterated her features. And in an odd anticipation of the Gorden Kaye case, the same court in ...”

“... turning both to another physical pleasure (as Gurov will with his watermelon in Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’), and to masculine, practical matters. All the versions cited here begin, unsurprisingly, with ‘Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth . . .’ Wall goes on: was mending one of the two broken reins with his little ...”

“... forward from Sundays and feast days, when my mother took me to Mass and we implored the pretty lady in the blue headscarf to pray for us sinners, but I don’t think like that any more. Now, I think that, if anything distinguishes us from the other animals, for better or worse, it is sin. Sin binds us to others, it makes us companionable, and the only ...”

“... rules for lodging a lawsuit, who persuaded the victim’s mother to change her mind. But the old lady later gave up her efforts, leaving the lawyers without a client.Beijing launched a ruthless counterattack. The central propaganda machine – CCTV, the People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, plus the news outlets ordered to use Xinhua’s feed on pain of ...”

“... many grandchildren underfoot; eventually they’re banished from the room. What do you ask ‘the Lady Macbeth of the Rwandan genocide’, as Philip Gourevitch called her? How do you approach a conversation with someone who’s been portrayed as the latter-day incarnation of a legendary sorceress in Rwandan dynastic history? Or as the ultimate ‘Hutu ...”

“... porn involving consenting adults. His refrigerator has a truly amazing capacity for beer and his lady friends of all ages have very audible cigarette lighters. There are some menus, gracefully thrown together, but the Narrator seems to eat more spaghetti than anything else. He slurps it up, in fact, which fits well with the oral passions elsewhere on ...”

“... though James hoped she would live on in his portraits of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Millie Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902). The third (uncompleted) volume, The Middle Years, published in 1917, a year after James’s own death, brings his life to early maturity in 1878, when he was 35. The only single-volume edition of the ...”

“... head (‘The Gift’), then a groovy song about an operation performed without anaesthetic (‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’). There’s a fair amount of blood spilled, a lot of Grand Guignol – and a heavy dose of juvenile idiocy – in these songs. It’s worth thinking about why this has been tolerated, even admired in the case of the Velvet ...”

“... out to be the holy fool’s daughter with the Tatar. Looking for all the world like a highborn lady, the holy fool glances towards us and smiles. On that glance we cut to a dejected Boriska. He reacts to his achievement by breaking down and crying. His father, he confesses to Rublev, passed on to him no secret. The boy was winging it. What the old man knew ...”

“... had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles’), its unheard-of length (‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ filling a whole side) and its strange, secretive instrumentation achieving what Dylan would later define as ‘that thin, that wild mercury sound’. These three seminal albums were created over a period of just 14 months, and their ...”

“... poetry – which read in bulk can sound as though Shakespeare’s sonnets to the so-called ‘dark lady’ are being recited on an endless fast-forward loop with ‘White Goddess’ and ‘Muse’ substituted for the dark mistress – depends for its force on being entirely (to go back to Woolf’s perfectly apt word) ingenuous. These are meant as real ...”

“... Angela Brazil, given to saying such things as ‘What a lark! What a sell!’ Converted as an old lady to the new religion, she conceives the duty of her piety to be the discovery and excavation of the True Cross. She is impatient with the theologians who are meanwhile busy inventing Christian metaphysics: ‘There’s a solid chunk of wood waiting for them ...”

“... down the staircase or, having begun to do so, would retreat thinking, “There’s that eccentric Lady Levey crawling across the hall.”’ In 1983, Brophy was told she had multiple sclerosis, ‘or, rather, that the results of all the tests thoroughly conformed with my having it – a presumably legalistic formula that reminded me of my sending ...”

“... society hostess and philanthropist Eugenie Schwarzwald, who was, as Delany describes her, ‘Lady Ottoline Morrell, Beatrice Webb, A.S. Neill and Margot Asquith, all rolled into one’. Schwarzwald surrounded herself with a hand-picked group of youngsters who were invited to spend their holidays in her country house, which she ran like a summer camp. It ...”