“... hippy baby-sitter (high on Speed) who cooks the baby instead of the Christmas turkey. Or the old lady who shampoos her poodle and puts it to dry in the microwave oven. Or the take-away chicken that turns out to be a finger-lickin’ rat. Or the Porsche that’s on sale for 50 dollars (Mr Average has run away with his secretary leaving his wife instructions ...”

“... in.) When, I ask myself, did the last parlourmaid work in the streets around our house? The old lady who lived next door to us said that Lady Kingscliffe (there is a Kingscliffe Gardens in the neighbourhood) had a parlourmaid who had morning and afternoon uniforms. Did our own terraced house have such a grand ...”

“... in virginal white, waiting in her borrow’d likeness of shrunk death. Christopher Kane’s Lady Macbeth crouches in an evening gown, her hands full of red petals, looking more like Shelley’s beloved heaping rose leaves on the bed. If only it were Fuseli’s Lady Macbeth seizing the bloody daggers (his Titania and ...”

“... your own reading and to think about street children then and now. Stand Coachman, or the Haughty Lady Well Fitted shows what is said to be a true incident. A lady refused to move her coach which was blocking the path, so a man opened the door, climbed in and made his way out the other side, followed by ‘the mob ...”

“... but the characters in Poor Things are talking only about a single word in a well-known scene. A lady asks another character in the Wilde play about his family and he says he doesn’t know who he is by birth. ‘I was … well, found … in a handbag.’ The lady repeats part of the answer as a bewildered question (‘a ...”

“... of Catherine of Valois – wife of Henry V, disinterred during Henry VII’s rebuilding of the Lady Chapel. ‘I did kiss her mouth,’ he wrote in 1669. In 1806, having failed to ‘get’ Nelson after his death (he was buried in St Paul’s), the vergers had a wax effigy of him made and put it on show for sixpence a pop. Later, in 1843, Parliament had to ...”

“... proposal, and the following summer Augusta came to London in need of Byron’s financial help. Lady Oxford had recently ended her affair with the poet and returned to her husband, and Byron could not resist the ‘irreplaceable joy’ offered by his sister. In an account written after the marriage collapsed, Annabella claims that, within hours of their ...”

“... Barrett Browning had become a damsel famed in story. In 1934 Virginia Woolf observed that ‘“Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” is glanced at perhaps by two professors in American universities once a year; but we all know how Miss Barrett lay on her sofa; how she escaped from the dark house in Wimpole Street one September morning; how she met health and ...”

“... lover Teresa Guiccioli and her husband, and so on? Are we still interested in the tempests with Lady Caroline Lamb? It is all the worse realising that it will end with the expedition to join the Greek War of Independence, uncomfortably like the scheme of a fantasist. ‘Writing, even with genius, did not appear to him to fulfil a great man’s duty: it had ...”

“... still swells up, and up so big you’d never believe, it could be a football there in the leg. The lady kept at us, why don’t you see the doctor? Try everything. What harm can that possibly do? Made him sick – no way would he keep anything down – medicine killing him, we threw it all out. Never went back. No one’s come near till the police – God ...”

“... Essays and Commentaries. A coffee-table Book of Popular Betjeman Dogs and Horses, edited by Lady Penelope. An unofficial ‘pirated’ life of Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. Organised Platypus Races in Australia. Most of these being explored at this very moment by John ...”

“... made up of a dentist’s chair, A store dummy, an electric hair-dryer, steak knives ... When a lady fainted seeing me in my underwear. Some nights, however, they opened a hundred doors, Always to a different room, and could not find me. There was only a short squeak now and then, As if a bird had been trapped out there in the dark. The Avenue of Earthly ...”

“... We are told the tale      of troubled Mæðhilde, Geat’s much-loved      lovesick lady; disturbing dreams      dispossessed her of sleep. As that passed over      may this pass also. For thirty long winters      the warlord Đeodric held the fort of the Mærings,      his fame known to many. As that passed over ...”

“... Lark, My Antonia and One of Ours) in passing, as she does the subsequent démeublé novels A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy; she mentions The Professor’s House, arguably Cather’s finest work, only when it provides evidence for her theses. We do not see Cather at work on these books. When we last see her she is ‘drawing upon her, own ...”

“... reason to believe that the Government’s policies are benign in inspiration. Rather the reverse. Lady Thatcher as prime minister was entirely open in her determination to destroy those quasi-constitutional conventions of British political life which underlay the hated ‘consensus’ and the country’s decline. Moreover, the language of a bastard ...”