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“... Ever since she said it, there has been a run of near misses or all-buts, beginning with Another Lady’s completion of Jane Austen’s fragment ‘Sanditon’, and continuing with someone else’s notion of ‘The Watsons’. Then, in the autumn of 1977, there was an Austen discovery, not of a novel but not of a fragment either – a complete new ...”

“... would have had commercial value: women’s verse was ‘much the fashion of late’, according to Lady Masham in 1685. A smart bookseller friend, Benjamin Crayle, published Barker’s poems in a volume that also included some of his own. This arrangement was not unusual: the male admirer and female poet form an ideal literary couple exchanging enthusiasms and ...”

“... for food. A bowl of cold chicken curry later, I half-led, half-pushed it back home to the gaga lady upstairs – the Flower Girl, the Millionairess, former star of the silent screen – who lived on chocolate and cigarettes. Sshhh, she whispered, one finger on her lips, the same sound of the sea I could hear beyond Flamborough Head. Blossom I'm in ...”

“... among others: Lest at least two kinds of Christians during their annual shoot-out Bisect an old lady who hears the word ‘Duck!’ But can’t hit the deck because of sciatica (May her stoop be steep) – Lest the Druze and the Jews or the Juze and the Drews, When shelling each other from somewhere each side Of a ridge or a bridge, Cascade hot shrapnel on ...”

“... impressive, Wide and high, with its tiled floor and untreated oak very moving’? Ruby, in her tea-lady blue pinafore, stamped half-heartedly on the tiles And showed no sign of softening at the sight of untreated oak. We filed out of the porch into the sun. The air was heavy in the churchyard, smelling of yew. Across the road was a roll of low hills, picture ...”

“... our hands, dark as shadows, silent, we looked on, gravely, at this desperate bereavement. – Dear lady, I fear you’ll never grasp the politics of this. Monsieur Napoleon, that’s his real name, is a prince who worships poverty. He loves servants and palaces, loves hounds, horses, gambling, soft mattresses and at the same time he is saving society, the ...”

“... pale colours. If my mother were alive, Margaret Thatcher’s mock-Georgian Dulwich house and its Lady would be the metaphors made manifest. (Not that she’s like the Lady: she’d think she should straighten up, lose a few pounds, cut the pussy-cat bows.) I wish, then, that the piece of journalism that Beatrix ...”

“... charged with the murder of ten young women since 1971. I’m standing up against this tree, when a lady comes ambling up wrapped in a red scarf. ‘You one of them reporters?’ she says, pressing her lips down, inclining her head, screwing up her eyes. ‘Kind of. Are you one of them locals?’ I say, screwing mine up the same way. She ...”

“... to be ‘not quite a gentleman’; one of them was Lord Rosslyn, but his guest’s ability to make Lady Rosslyn laugh saved the day, and the Rosslyns’ young daughter was won over by the same method. And on and on it goes. Anthony Powell remembers that when they were both staying with the Longfords ‘John made everybody laugh.’ ‘Betch made me ...”

“... the Gaelic culture that their ancestors had been intent on suppressing. Before Yeats’s patron Lady Gregory came to collect folklore in the West of Ireland, her future husband William had been busy drafting the notorious Gregory clause in the depths of the Great Famine, which deprived thousands of relief-seeking small farmers of their paltry piece of land ...”

“... that the man who wrote ‘She walks in beauty like the night’ could also observe (of a different lady, naturally): ‘Her cunt tasted of anchovies.’ However, the remark brutally typifies Byron’s relationships or misrelationships with women, whom he treated very badly. Observing him, in Nye’s version, democratically dropping his breeches for cooks or ...”

“... stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in Dorchester: Tea at Max Gate. Lady Stacie there, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan – and a fashionable lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the tea-table. He shut her up by saying ‘I am not interested in my novels. I ...”

“... women were subject to much knightly attention. The elaborate code of service and subjection to a lady found in courtly love was not just a game. The presence of women in the audience at tournaments spurred men on in their combat with each other, turning this combat into a form of sexual display. Women occasionally took a more active part in chivalry’s ...”

“... view, gives an equal interest to the diary of a Dodd, an Amiel, or a Mabel Barrows, a young lady of 16 who in 1885 was keeping an artless private record at St Margaret’s School in Waterbury, Connecticut. ‘Mabel’, as she liked to be known to her friends – her real name was Mary – had various crushes on her fellow students (‘Carrie and I lay ...”

“... of a learned dining club. One of his stories concerned a don and a colleague, a nervous lady, who were doing the B. Lit. viva of a black man. The male don has a sudden fit, jumps to his feet, shouts, splutters, and turns coal black on the instant. The lady thus abruptly outnumbered runs from the room with outcries ...”