“... intrusions of human presence in swathed columns of drapery and colour. In the stunning picture of Lady Meux – born Susan Langdon, the mistress of a corporal in the Life Guards before she married a brewing heir – with black ground, black gown, black gloves, white furs, Lady Meux is more of a tidy little mannequin than a ...”

“... victims enjoying rape or being humiliated in court. Jestbook assumptions are central to works like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Virtue in Danger’, a sarcastic ballad on a real-life society case of 1721, and to the startling premise of Eliza Haywood’s novel of 1727, The Lucky Rape. Decades later more decorous women writers were still using the basic ...”

“... just out of reach. Over house-roofs: sullen hills, the firth drained down to sandbanks: the Reckit Lady, the Shair as Daith. I lay to sleep, with by my side neither man nor child; but a lichened branch that wound through the wooden chamber, pulling it close. It seemed a complicity like our own, when arm in arm on the city street, we bemoan our families, our ...”

“... of Victorian stage-Irishness as a literary mode, but also their glorified replacement, once Yeats, Lady Gregory and the rest of them got going on the campaign to add dignity to Ireland. ‘The looking-glass, cracked, does not tell the truth’ – and the resulting distortions are, in a sense, John Wilson Foster’s subject in his impressive new scrutiny of ...”

“... dowagers present said something more than usually fatuous’. The dowagers are identified as Lady Lee of Fareham and Lady Robertson. The former ‘comes from Maine and looks like the matron of a cottage-hospital’. The latter ‘comes from Virginia and looks like a peach-fed ham’. Given this gratuitous abuse of the ...”

“... the mother, Lucia (Silvana Mangano), at home looking just as bored and lonely as a bourgeois lady is supposed to, and the maid, Emilia (Laura Betti), taking care of a few chores. All this in black and white, as if to remind us what Neorealism used to look like before Fellini got hold of it. A postman fluttering his arms like an angel’s wings – just ...”

“... farmworkers, the tramps, the goat-breeding dropouts, the tree-saving professor, the rich old lady and her maid, the small-time crooks – than we do about Mona, since they are still around and talking, if only in cameos. The question the film asks and won’t (can’t) answer is what Mona wants. It’s as if she is revising 1960s hippiedom by excluding ...”

“... Murders in the Rue Morgue’, in which an escaped orangutan turns out to have decapitated an old lady and shoved her daughter up a chimney – but it was the first directly to address the phenomenon that became known as phone hacking. A message has been intercepted. Its contents, if disclosed, would do great damage to an illustrious person. The police know ...”

“... being the creepy personification of those consequences, a naked woman dripping blood, an old lady in a nightdress, a naked man on a roof. Is everyone followed by such figures? No, but the girl at the beginning was, and the figure did more than follow her. There are times when you might think you were watching an Enid Blyton story worked over for the ...”

“... on, when we revisit this scene, the interviewer says, ‘but it’s a war on drugs, not on you, Lady,’ and Holiday replies: ‘Yes, that’s what they want you to think.’ In the meantime, she has been arrested while singing ‘Strange Fruit’ and been convicted for possessing and shooting up heroin. She serves eleven months in a prison in West ...”

“... that gives any clue. However, just before the train arrives at Cardiff the very proper bourgeois lady takes out her compact and with her lipstick carefully draws the French flag on each cheek and on her forehead and colours them in. This is done so unselfconsciously and without a smile R. feels that for this alone they deserve to win. 25 April. At five a ...”

“... against them, discovered some twenty years ago by Isobel Grundy among the papers of his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Fielding seems to have been playing on Lady Mary’s hostility to Pope and his friends, and may have hoped through her influence to secure the patronage of the Prime Minister Walpole. There was no ...”

“... and involving two personalities as well as the poet’s: the ‘fair young man’ and the ‘dark lady’. For a very long time – this approach still dominates at least the more conservative or biographical criticism – the Sonnets have been read as telling some kind of love story, the objects a man and a woman (Sonnets 1-126, 127-152): and the far more ...”

“... quest’ for an American stage personality of the next generation, Adah Isaacs Menken. This lady had already received the attention of at least seven previous biographers without anyone being left much the wiser about who she really was or even when she was born – sometime around 1835 seems likely. It is certain that she was carried bareback (in more ...”

“... they stand to a possible fact. If Walter de la Mare had known a disquieting and dominating old lady, and written about her, he would not also have been able to write the masterpiece of ‘Seaton’s Aunt’. The process works another way, too. In his splendid stories John Updike creates a far more telling image of himself as a denizen of suburban ...”