“... mythic prototype for female-on-female mayhem, the rebel is an Outraged Daughter and the boss lady her Wicked Old Mother: Clytemnestra’s doom is sealed when she puts her sex life ahead of her daughter’s. At other times it’s a matter of plain old class rage: a put-upon servant who’s had enough of a tyrannical mistress. In France in 1933 the ...”

“... clothes mark themselves out as stupid, vulgar or malicious. In Mansfield Park the culpably inert Lady Bertram is ‘a woman who spent her days in sitting nicely dressed on a sofa’. Mrs Elton in Emma condemns herself when she asks Jane Fairfax’s opinion as to whether she should put a particular trim on her white and silver poplin. After such a lapse we ...”

“... him, then, for producing, with elegant economy, a vivid impression of this bizarre and remarkable lady. Perhaps it is his running quarrel with her that gives his book its momentum. Ivy is a physical presence from the first pages: a strapping girl, dark, clumsy, handsome (increasingly so as she grew older), forceful and unaccommodating. She was born Ivy Low in ...”

“... love her memory – respect her piety and high moral tone. But she does always seem to me a lady rather than a woman.’ Measuring Hemans’s contribution to letters seems to be inseparable from ‘the intellectual measuring of bust and hips’, as Mary Ellmann calls it in Thinking about Women. Even when the poetry is criticised, her dress sense is ...”

“... embarrassment, and to fail to acquire French a great disappointment. His friendships with such as Lady Gregory and Arthur Symons offered him only limited access to either language. Despite his wretched start and these persistent incapacities, he became a remarkably well-read intellectual, with a passion for Nietzsche, for Plato and Neoplatonism, for learned ...”

“... he simply tries to enlarge its vocabulary. So the next page has this: ‘Pretentious lunch with Lady Bonham Carter – Madame de Margerie like a nightmare, hotted-up Lady Colefax.’ Then this: ‘a three-cornered conversation with Elizabeth [Bowen] on the awfulness of women writers and the nastiness of her friend Mrs ...”

“... reputation as a good writer, and established a model for royal biography successfully followed by Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back ...”

“... She was feeling better. ‘Now, David,’ she said, ‘if that ever happens to you with a lady again, don’t get into a panic. You put the lady on her bed, cover her, put a glass of water and a sleeping pill on the bedside table, turn the lights down very low, adjust your tie before you leave so you’ll look ...”

“... was born Sybil Cooper, sister of Alfred Duff Cooper (created first Viscount Norwich), so that Lady Diana Cooper was to become his aunt, he Lady Diana’s publisher. On the maternal side, Sybil Cooper was descended directly from King William IV through his mistress Mrs Jordan, in her day a celebrated actress. It is ...”

“... as a running monologue by the paranoid protagonist, who rails against everything from his cleaning lady’s habit of moving things around to the long queues at the butcher’s. We are locked inside his sadistic world to the end, when the man triumphantly proves his innocence after a Metro worker accuses him of not paying his fare. He is indeed innocent but his ...”

“... nearly a decade before. Neon had just arrived on Broadway along with George and Ira Gershwin’s Lady, Be Good! The lights turned Times Square into a celebration of American individualism (‘name in lights’); the Gershwin songs turned Manhattan into a playground, ‘an isle of joy’. At a stroke, a new urban rhythm pointed the musical in a streamlined ...”

“... as The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke – the other being A Letter to an Honourable Lady, where the lifelong bachelor Greville offered a mistreated wife (now unidentifiable, and perhaps imaginary) the questionable benefit of his advice and consolation. Sidney and Greville had been born in the same year, 1554; and from the day they entered ...”

“... The heroine of An Academic Question enquires if her new client at the Home is a woman. ‘ “A lady,” Sister Dew corrected me.’ For both novelists it is an important distinction, socially and morally. In the technical sense, Pym herself was only marginally a lady, while Brookner’s European background makes the ...”

“... box that looks like nothing so much as the coffin for a classical modernist Snow White, let the lady come out to me. No sound but the deep, distant bass of the sea; a gull or two; pines, hushing one another. So I waited. And waited. And I found myself wondering just what it was the scent of jasmine reminded me of, in order to take my mind off what I knew ...”

“... changed. And yet what might have been fatally bad luck becomes the book’s great strength. The Lady and the Peacock is an essential record of the struggle for democracy in Burma before the mysteries and promise of the Thein Sein era: a reminder of the 49 long years that preceded eight breathless months of reform. No other leader commands such moral power ...”