“... does. Even so, Woolworth’s would hardly have been her cup of tea. The other long-standing lady in Larkin’s life (and who stood for a good deal), Monica Jones, remarks that to the Larkins the least expenditure of effort was ‘something heroic’: ‘Mrs Larkin’s home was one in which if you’d cooked lunch you had to lie down afterwards to ...”

“... out in primetime. The other story in the same episode involves the titular hero robbing an old lady in the street, shouting ‘Shut up, you old bag!’ as she tries to stop him running off with her loaf. The live studio audience laughed.The new TV/old TV boundary looks even less clear-cut if you take countries other than the US into account. How do you fit ...”

“... political violence as a playwright. The play in question was Cathleen Ni Houlihan, written with Lady Gregory and first performed in Dublin in April 1902, with Maud Gonne playing Cathleen. In an interview with the United Irishman, Yeats said that the subject was ‘Ireland and its struggle for independence’. The theatre was packed every night. The message ...”

“... are about education, because clearly the flow of travel gossip could be tiresomely endless. As the Lady says in Comus, recognising the threat to her purity:A thousand fantasiesBegin to throng into my memoryOf calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,And airy tongues, that syllable men’s namesOn sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses.She goes on:These ...”

“... pay when economic recovery’s at stake. They both talk contemptuously of gesture politics as if Lady Thatcher having tea with the General isn’t gesture politics too, the gesture in question being two fingers to humanity. 1 November. Lord Tebbit writes to the Times saying that homosexuals should be banned from sensitive cabinet posts lest they be in a ...”

“... figure in the sonnets, and she is depicted, perhaps unwittingly on Lowell’s part, as Dark Lady or Super-Bitch par excellence. In her letters and phone calls she is forever patting herself on the back for running to Dalton to pick up Harriet’s grades or driving her to camp, and she dwells irritatingly on Harriet’s goodness … Poor Harriet emerges ...”

“... Northwick Lodge in its palmy days: two long-term residents … (a female violin teacher and an old lady named Miss Evans, both of whom Jones liked) … Miss Knott, an impoverished upper-class spinster; a diamond merchant from South Africa and Whitechapel; Mr Feakins, an automobile salesman who tried to sell motor cars to the others, including Jones; and a ...”

“... switched to the Táin, a medieval work about the wars between Connaught and Ulster, translated by Lady Gregory in 1902 and decades later by Thomas Kinsella, which became an Iliad for independent Ireland. It is given a place of honour at the start of The Field Day Anthology. As a vision of the four green fields, however, it is divisive and gory. Was Kinsella ...”

“... Belfast, and trying to write short stories in a remote part of Ontario: ‘I thought of this old lady who used to come to our house. She was a spinster who had some Civil Service job to do with sanitation and she lived most of her life with her “dear aunt”. They’d not been “grand” but they had pretensions, and she had very genteel manners.’ The ...”

“... into thought: Is the Night chilly and dark? The Night is chilly, but not dark . . . when the Lady pass’d, there came A Tongue of Light, a Fit of Flame, And Christabel saw the Lady’s Eye, And nothing else saw she thereby. The poet is here using the speech of thought, and casting it into the colloquialism of a ...”

“... Virgin walks And roses spiral her enamelled face Or fall to splinters on unwatered streets. Our Lady of Babylon, go by, go by, I was once the apple of your eye; Flies, flies are on the plane tree, on the streets. The vatic ferocity of it all seems numbing and alien. And yet for all that, it still depends on things being seen ...”

“... only sister. She had studied art in Paris with Estella Solomons and Beatrice Elvery, later Lady Glenavy, both artists who regularly showed in the Dublin galleries. Cissie married Boss Sinclair, a Dublin antiques dealer and friend of the painter William Orpen; in the early 1920s the Sinclairs moved to Germany, where they dealt in contemporary German ...”

“... to play excerpts from Tristan because of the music’s immorality: ‘I cannot play that, my dear lady!’ he says to Gerda, ‘I am your most devoted servant but I cannot. That is not music – believe me! … this is chaos! This is demagogy, blasphemy, insanity, madness! It is a perfumed fog, shot through with lightning! It is the end of all honesty in ...”

“... and scratches he seemed unable to cease giving himself every few seconds. There was the wacked-out lady in Toronto who, as a friend and I trudged down snowy Bloor Street, abruptly wiggled out of every flimsy article of clothing she was wearing and lunged at us, nude and flailing and shrieking, in menacing fashion. Less violent, but no less eerie, was a teenage ...”

“... of Army Medical Services and of nursing organisation’). From that entry I also learn that the Lady with the Lamp was ‘a good mimic’, which is not what I recalled from Lytton Strachey, though in the entry for Strachey (1880-1932, ‘biographer and literary reviewer’) I learn that he thought the DNB ‘one of the most useful works ever ...”