“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Midgley down the long corridor. ‘I’ll give you such a clatter when I get you home, young lady,’ Jean was saying. ‘He did save up.’ ‘Only a week,’ said the child. ‘When we get there,’ said Hartley, ‘we want to go in in twos. All together would be too much of a strain.’ ‘What’s he doing going to Barnard Castle?’ said Jean. ‘He ...”

“... beneath the ‘three-piled velvet’ of human flesh, or the rich attire that bedecks the ‘bony lady’ of Vindice’s murderous puppet-play. This preoccupation with deceptive surfaces and theatrical pretence is in turn closely related to one of the most distinctive features of Middleton’s style: his fondness for simile and relative indifference to ...”

“... the latent eroticism of its homosocial intensities, philia is at last undone by eros in the Dark Lady sequence, in which the poet is degraded by the ‘perverse, self-imposed … slavery’ of heterosexual lust: ‘But my five wits, nor my five senses can/Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,/Who leaves unsway’d the likeness of a man,/Thy proud ...”

“... uses his annual holiday to take to the roads of Surrey and Sussex, where he encounters a young lady whose head has been turned by romances featuring New Women, in rational costume, peddling towards independence by way of the revamped coaching inns of Haslemere, Midhurst and Bognor. Hoopdriver, the amateur excursionist, is encouraged, before he sets off, by ...”

“... Once her diaristic poem-texts let us in on her ‘urge to shit voltaire style’; now we get Our Lady of the Cat Litter Tray. A typical diary text of old was: ‘i rummage thru the closet. it takes a long time, but i finally find what i am looking for. a sack of red skin.’ Now, she tells us she spends her days sprawled in front of ITV3 for ...”

“... mass of confidences from morbid spinsters’ (though he had reason to be grateful when one lady admirer made him a gift of £40,000, guaranteeing his financial security for life). Fred, meanwhile, ‘did not feel that I had been selling my soul for lucre and a facile popularity, but rather that I had pawned it’. The collective fault was ...”

“... said he had travelled to volunteer in Poland but had contracted Covid and was ‘looking for a lady to spend time with who has or has recently had Covid’. You could tell yourself that these men weren’t seeking to exploit Ukrainian women for profit so much as looking for a wartime hook-up scene, but that wouldn’t explain why (or how) so many of them ...”

“... in Rome, of Princess Agnes (1205-1282), the daughter of yet another King Wenceslas. (An old lady whose house lies on the steep way to St Vitus’s Cathedral put a notice in her window: ‘Pilgrims are welcome to a night’s lodging, but I have only two beds, two eiderdowns and four blankets.’) This is the first Czech uprising fully supported by the ...”

“... assurance: ‘I’ll be all right if I’m not joggled,’ he may be saying to some anxious lady. There is a suggestion of the later Evelyn Waugh. Still, though the method can produce boss shots, the sturdy indifference to received opinion, the basic earnestness and the eye open to the whole scene, allow her to come out with important ...”

“... the anti-Bradleyanism of his Cambridge days, the time of L.C. Knights’s How many children had Lady Macbeth?, as well as against the more high-falutin criticism that poured out in his later years, the product of academic market pressures or perhaps a corrupt neo-Christianity. People had stopped understanding what poets actually do; Empson would ...”

“... and the cliché-ridden terms in which it was rendered into English by such as Standish O’Grady, Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde, who became president of Ireland at the time the book was being completed. But it is too easy to make these connections between Joyce and O’Brien and too easy also to misread O’Brien’s regular assaults on Joyce as an aspect of ...”

“... beer at the Gato Félix and ends up inviting me to her place to meet her mother, a nice, plump lady with dyed red hair who speaks laughingly of her two ‘women-daughters’ as Viky smokes a joint next to her and her chihuahua; her brother Rúben works in a maquila and her husband, José, a serious, handsome man, works in an office. The family is from ...”