“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at which MGM in its heyday excelled.Brogan writes that Garland was ‘the studio’s top leading lady’ in the age of the MGM musical. His hefty book – many years in the making – is a rich resource for anyone who wants to gaze on hitherto unpublished photographs of the wondrous one. Almost all of them are ‘from the author’s collection’, including ...”

“... was almost as brutal as it was for Africans; racial difference was not decisive. He quotes a ‘Lady of Quality’ who sailed with bonded servants from Scotland to the West Indies. ‘It is hardly possible,’ she wrote, ‘to believe that human nature could be so depraved, as to treat fellow creatures in such a manner for so little gain.’ Up to a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... me to John Russell, an 88-year-old ex-engineer in a residential care home. ‘I saw one old lady trying to stagger off with six bottles,’ Russell said. ‘They were carried for her by a complete stranger.’ He introduced me to Joan Bufton, whose daughter needs kidney dialysis three times a week; at the height of the floods she was pushed out of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... out of politics reached an apogee with ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ (1959), in which the Lady Arrogant – as enemies sometimes called her – took one look at the famous picture of Elizabeth Eckford, the lone Black girl on her way into school being yelled at by a line of hate-filled whites, and decided that the most important thing going on in it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... probably wrote in the year Jervas was painting his portrait, 1717, the ‘Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady’: which, tender and beautiful as much of it is, had such difficulty dramatising personal feeling through the (in practice) highly unstable characters of the heroine, the villainous uncle, the lover and the poet (and are these last two the same?) as to earn ...”

“... women, already beside themselves with fear, swore to the interpreter that the little old lady was mad, she’d been mad for some time, she was confusing Marinkovic with another man, who had, in any case, left the hospital and fled north into Serbia proper. There was no one from the Krajina here, they were sure of it. And when we walked them round to ...”

“... practice of vaccination in fact came to England from the folk-healers of the Ottoman Empire, via Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Edward Jenner himself credited it as common knowledge among farm people that those who had had cowpox could safely nurse those ill from smallpox, and that those who had had smallpox did not get cowpox. And while his having learnt ...”