“... 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 ...”

“... whoever’s available and an exercise we went through both with The Madness of George III and The Lady in the Van partly to find out how long the play is likely to be and also to get some notion of what it’s about. And it is helpful, though painful and embarrassing too as some sections are far from finished, the characters scarcely sketched in and the plot ...”

“... O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Antonia (1918), One of Ours (1922), A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor’s House (1925) among them – it was exactly this quality of noble withholding that she sought to achieve. Cather’s preference may have been shaped by emotional identification. Unlike Bernhardt, whose love affairs were ...”

“... the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlour.’ He domesticates the whale – much as Ahab deifies it – only to reinforce our sense of its strength. In the middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of his dignity, and kitten-like he ...”

“... remains a congeries of impressions: slender, volatile, domineering, dependent, Galician, ‘not a lady’ (according to her grandson Martin). A displaced person, she never learned German but spoke Yiddish in Vienna until her death in 1930, nine years before Freud. Peter Gay already acknowledged that Freud seemed never to have addressed his mother’s hold ...”

“... this point her health was poor and some criticised Brown’s gesture as exploitative of a sick old lady, but she greatly appreciated it, cherishing the opportunity to stand and wave outside her old home once again. She had little else to cheer her. Dementia had robbed her of much of her acuity. Her relations with her children, Mark and Carol, were ...”