“... by her first name and surname; but if she’s married to a knight or baronet then she’s ‘Hon. Lady’ followed by her surname; and if she’s married to a commoner she’s just ‘Hon. Mrs’ followed by her surname. There are pages and pages of this U and Non-U, posher-than-posh tosh. The guidance also states that ‘a title of nobility should always be ...”

“... it with alacrity. Very soon after, his new wife’s ex-colleague, a very large and formidable lady equally unconjugal in temperament, found herself in the same quandary, so Auden (exclaiming ‘What else are buggers for?’ in a perhaps only slightly complex tone) produced like a rabbit out of a hat a friend of E.M. Forster’s, who happened to be slight ...”

“... English girl who walks out, however harmlessly, with a coloured American soldier,’ a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, the queen mother, wrote to Violet Markham in 1942, ‘should be made to understand that she will very probably cause his death.’ Her remark manages to express in one breath solicitude for the girl and the soldier and raw prejudice ...”

“... should be read ambiguously, especially in the light of her views on Virginia Woolf and other posh lady novelists. ‘I must confess,’ she wrote, that I am green with envy of your kind of assurance. I feel as if I could write in as much detail about my Uncle Artie, say – but what would be the significance? Nothing at all. He became a drunkard, fought with ...”

“... daughter, prancing round the lounge, simpering and chanting ‘Look at me, I’m a Miss World lady,’ but it’s like sex-and-gender-based oppression is a sore head or a streaky patch on a window. Find the remedy, and it’s gone. Limbo dancing, Peter Hain’s sideburns, the Angry Brigade, King Crimson: these films are always so good on perky period ...”

“... Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ and writes that ‘during the years-long squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls’ – why? The answer is obvious: too sweaty. Wallace perspires freely in the foreground, while Paltrow perches mauve-and-beigely on her stool ...”

“... the theatre of the conte philosophique. A Voltairean aside such as ‘Mélinade (the name of the lady, which I had my reasons for withholding, not having thought of it until now)’ is every bit as unaccommodating as Samuel Beckett’s ‘and for other reasons better not wasted on cunts like you’. Voltaire regarded the short tale as a duel with the ...”

“... of Ferrara surely fathered Gilbert Osmond, Henry James’s lethal dilettante in The Portrait of a Lady: a man who at first represents ‘the artistic life’ to the naive heroine, but whose antiquarian talent proves in fact confined, in a penetrating image, to tracing the common coinage of the world around him, just as Ferrara ends triumphantly with ‘cast ...”

“... in which Leiris tried to trace his initiation into manhood, and from seeing the mysterious Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, just brought out from wartime storage: ‘What has it meant to me to be a woman?’ At first, she protested to Sartre that her sex ‘just hasn’t counted’. Look again, he said. ‘You weren’t brought up in the same way as a ...”

“... reinforced by what he had seen during his voyage on the Beagle. In Brazil, he lived near an old lady who kept instruments of torture to crush the fingers of her female slaves. ‘I have stayed,’ Darwin wrote, ‘in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal ...”

“... I’m trying to lose.’ ‘Still. We could maybe find something.’ ‘I am going​ to marry a lady that has a little girl about your age,’ my father had said. ‘And this little girl has not got any father. So you have to promise me one thing and that is that you will never tease her or say anything mean to her about that. There’ll be times when you ...”

“... only by a metonym is telling – perhaps intended, too, as a small frowning courtesy to the three lady members of the fifteen-strong committee.Court cases are inevitably a key part of the record: often pitiful in themselves, and with potentially terrible consequences of exposure and professional ruin. Sir George Mowbray Bt, chairman of Berkshire County ...”

“... a large Scotch. While it was being fetched he added: ‘And kindly be so good as to give the young lady opposite another glass of whatever it is she’s having.’ Linda began to protest, but Tone raised his hands and insistently pushed their palms in her direction several times. ‘My pleasure, my pleasure,’ he repeated. Linda soon gave in, and when she was ...”

“... living in the houses nearby certainly regarded it as this, and one couple built a grotto to Our Lady in remembrance of the babies. Several witnesses to the commission recall finding bones when the new housing estate was being built. In the early 1990s a priest wrote to the council on behalf of local residents pointing out that ‘the children’s burial ...”

“... times, that effect of that over time it filled the cup to the brim that is … in that sense, My Lady.So Pistorius doesn’t just sound like a woman, he is a woman. This almost defies comment, but not quite. This claim yet again to be speaking in a woman’s voice – ‘I have had enough’ – the voice of a woman who, we are to imagine, has just been, for ...”