“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... when I needed to sit down on the steps of buildings. He deposited me, like a little frail old lady, at my door. After a few days, when my walking had improved, the hospital called to say that it was time to do another CT scan. First I had to do some blood tests. These made it clear that I needed to get water intravenously, so I went into hospital for a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 inclusion of soap opera stock characters alongside Lynchian weirdos – the best is the Log Lady, who cradles her ponderosa pine pietà-style – but that ‘those who are not mad do not find the eccentric characters eccentric,’ as Michel Chion put it. And why would they? The comically overwrought relationships of the soap opera characters (the ...”