“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... very idea that she could have contained her thoughts to 140 characters is preposterous. The Lady was not for tweeting. But I should have been.’ Really? Not only is the thought of Brown tweeting his way to the nation’s hearts during the banking crisis pretty absurd, it’s also a piece of historical revisionism. Twitter only really got going in ...”

“... Clinton had taken a close interest in Chinese affairs as far back as the 1990s, when she was first lady. In 2011, as secretary of state, she initiated the pivot to Asia of the navy’s carrier groups, the most conspicuous weapons in the US strategic arsenal. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an obscure trade pact in which America had until then shown little ...”

“... an average American sitting in front of me on the bus stood to give his seat to an older Negro lady.’ After attending a concert by a Black nightclub pianist called Maurice Rocco, he registers his ‘impression that only Negroes give life, passion and nostalgia to this country that they colonise in their own way’.Colonise in their own way. The phrase ...”

“... life, Synge found a kindred spirit, another Irish Protestant, who had come for the same reason: Lady Gregory. ‘I was staying there, gathering folklore, and talking to the people,’ she wrote, ‘and felt a real pang of indignation when I passed another outsider walking here and there, talking also to the people. I was jealous of not being alone on the ...”

“... and contained,’ Streisand remembers. ‘Wasn’t a director supposed to talk to his leading lady?’ The main bone of contention – from this point until the end of Streisand’s acting career – was her feeling that true performance was improvisation. She couldn’t stand it when anyone suggested that she move to the same spot on the stage or make ...”

“... participation. Homophobia is both a moral and historical category error. Score one for Marcel and Lady Gaga: we were born this way. Strategic essentialism of this kind has been a route to rapid social change, of which legislative advances (decriminalisation, age of consent, marriage) are an index. But it has also been attended by uncertainties and ...”

“... about M’Coy, who has irritated him by friendly gossip just when he wanted to see the ankles of a lady stepping into a carriage (75): You and me, don’t you know? In the same boat. Softsoaping. Give you the needle that would. Can’t he hear the difference? Think he’s that way inclined a bit. Against my grain somehow. ‘That way’ without telling the ...”

“... 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 ...”