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“... 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 ...”

“... always seemed to settle me back then. Those with whom I lived considered me vain, excepting the Lady M, with whom I tirelessly played, Parcheesi, Scrabble, less circumscribed games. She would have bought for me a giant gold medallion could she have managed the expense, if only I would let her. Presently the soup was the colour of the room; everything ...”

“... Postwar The ruin on the island keeps away fragmented steps, shoulder bone of upper-storey arch, lady chapel, rank of skinned arms cracked at the wrist. New houses creep near like animals listening to the old – Teach Me Tonight – magnified through a trumpet fixed to the motherboard. My time was blonde scraped up in a froth. Now our white hair is arranged ...”

“... who the author of Pamela was when he wrote Shamela, but did know when he praised Clarissa. When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said ‘I heartily despise [Richardson] and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his works in a most scandalous manner,’ she was responding simultaneously to the power of the novels and to a personality felt through the work to be ...”

“... be missing. ‘Was Varlamov here today?’ a woman’s voice asks – that of a fine, but kind lady. What scenes these are. Splendour and misery. Servitude and its transfiguration. Yegorushka is engaged upon an entry into captivity which is also an escape. Many people like to think that great artists must be great innovators – even Chekhov, who refused ...”