“... wrong. Those ‘lone middle-aged men with their barley wines’ watching the strip show at the Lady Godiva: bearing in mind that ‘middle-aged’ means the author’s age or younger, is that really what they’re drinking? Stranger drinks have survived in the marketplace, either by defiant unwholesomeness (Irn-Bru) or energetic rebranding (Lucozade). So ...”

“... leave. Shaking and white-faced, they passed through the jeering throng. ‘Prostitutes!’ an old lady shrieked. ‘Rats!’ A man tried to leave the building, helped through the mob by some elderly men dressed as Cossacks, but the protesters followed him down the road. ‘Beat him! Beat him!’ one of the old women cried, chivvying the protesters on. He was ...”

“... in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a Trotskyist’: ‘Lady, I ain’t no Trotskyist. You should read up on the position of the USA Socialist Party on war, etc, and you will find that it is exactly ye old Leninist principle that the POUM stands for: turn imperialist war into civil war.’ Who was or wasn’t ...”

“... Saracen’s Head’ of going with William and Dorothy Wordsworth to dinner with a certain literary lady in the neighbourhood of Grasmere and being served a meagre dinner while the hostess gobbled up the only pheasant; Coleridge’s old father, the vicar of Ottery St Mary, badly short-sighted, mistaking a lady’s gown for ...”

“... have secrets of his own. In a literary novel with a Connie and a Clifford there is certainly a Lady Chatterley allusion lurking, but it isn’t Connie who is the focus of attention here. The chapter is set just before the affair erupts, and the book avoids dramatising those events, but jumps forward again by a handful of years, leaving a scattered trail of ...”

“... were born into an upper-middle-class London family: her father (whose sister, Elizabeth, became Lady Longford; Antonia Fraser is Harman’s cousin) was a doctor and her mother had qualified as a barrister, though she gave up work when she had children. Their four daughters were to be educated but marriageable; not too submissive or too assertive; and to be ...”

“... title of Portrait of an Englishwoman might promise a helping hand; but then again maybe not: the lady has been replaced by an impossible pile of stacked and suspended slabs, a giant non-figure of fantastic reinforced concrete viewed from somewhere around her unseen feet. ‘THE ACTUAL HUMAN BODY BECOMES OF LESS IMPORTANCE EVERY DAY,’ Lewis wrote elsewhere ...”

“... themselves or send their children out to play on the street or sit on the train with the Black lady in the picture. In 2022, Andreessen and his wife inveighed against building multi-family housing in their swanky Peninsula hometown of Atherton – average annual income $539,000, median home price $7.9 million – with an email to city government that ...”

“... Satires of Circumstance a wife tells her husband that she’s seen a vision of a pale, passionless lady who laid critical eyes on her; the husband says he’s seen nothing, before confessing to the reader that his ‘dead Love’ used to tell him, ‘with a small smile’, that she would come back posthumously ‘To any newer Love I might have found,/But show ...”

“... some years later, when I was about nine or ten. We had gone to a tea-shop on boat-race day where a lady had kindly asked whether I was Oxford or Cambridge. I had answered: ‘I’m a Jew.’A good deal of indoctrination must have gone into that. Did it come from reiteration by family that I was one of the chosen people? Did it come from explanation by nannies ...”

“... memorial volumes, regimental histories, military-souvenir websites – it is peculiar how many lady archivists you encounter. Some of these, it’s true, are part of husband and wife teams: the prolific Valmai Holt, for example, author, with her husband, of My Boy Jack? The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (1998). (John Kipling died in his first half-hour ...”

“... The practice is summarised in the mocking footnote we attach to Bradley: ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’ A similar topic, once much debated though now rarely reverted to, is: ‘How old, exactly, is Hamlet?’ The dimensions of the problem are these. The Prince is introduced to us as an undergraduate. But in the last phase of the tragedy, when ...”

“... this section] … She was actually coming out from a crowd rush after nearly fainting!’ writes a lady from West London. ‘In your typically misogynistic attempt at smearing these protesters,’ says a young man from Kuala Lumpur, ‘I have to hand it to you. This must be one of the coolest collections of photos I’ve seen from the day.’ Not so long ...”

“... was the equivalent of John Major’s convenient toothache at the time of the shafting of Lady Thatcher. A leak here, a hint there, a little gentle self-outing and Mandy was out of the limelight, picking up the sympathy vote, at the very moment when the monster he had unleashed, and gloried in, was about to come spectacularly off the rails. When the ...”

“... church groups, educators, army officers, priests, economists and, in one case, ‘a Maryland lady sojourning in New Haven’.In the July 1864 issue of The Ladies’ Repository, a writer going by the name ‘Philologus’ recommends ve/vis/vim for its ability to secure ‘precision, perspicuity and brevity’ in communication, as was only appropriate for ...”