“... take the eye to the foreground of the image; they have more character than the young lady at the clavichord, or even the painter himself. In a self-portrait you notice the bright pages of the large, open folio on which his hand rests before you look at his face. The eye is unwilling to leave the still lifes. Given that, sometimes at least, they ...”

“... quiet angles, is rather cornily pictured reading. She is said to have been mistaken for a cleaning lady when she turned up for the shoot. Really? In leaf-patterned stockings?There are also fantasies, lit up with defiant, glassy, fairground colour. Yevonde’s ‘goddesses’ sequence flirts with irony and with the ridiculous – Diana Mitford winsomely tilts ...”

“... composed lives of Catullus by arranging in a conjectural order the love-poems mentioning the lady whom he called Lesbia, and confidently told the public what roles were played in the life of Horace by Cinara, Lydia and Chloe. When the futility of this became apparent, scholars reacted by assuring the reader whenever a poet mentioned a ...”

“... too,’ he says, shoving his face into hers and taking a handful of eyeliners. Suddenly the little lady erupts. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘I’m a policewoman,’ and she brandishes her identification in his face as they do in police series. ‘You’re nicked.’ She isn’t exactly an intimidating figure and he’s practically out of the shop now anyway but ...”

“... on that day, she sometimes recited a mysterious poem called ‘Lasca’ about a spirited young lady in Texas who ‘sighed for a canter after the cattle’. A crack of the whip like a shot in a battle With the green below and the blue above And dash and danger and life and love. The spirited young lady came from East ...”

“... this is what can happen to great houses with ambiguous legacies.The copper beech tree on which Lady Gregory’s guests carved their names is close by. You can just make out some of the initials: GBS, SOC, WBY, JBY, AE. ‘All/That comes of the best knit to the best,’ Yeats wrote in ‘Upon a House Shaken by Land Agitation’. ...”

“... then elderly woman-and-novelist, I have grudgingly suffered photographs to be taken of me as lady writer: with cat … in front of a rubber plant … sitting with cup of tea gazing at a typewriter. No one has suggested the lady-writer with knitting shot. It may be that they dared not. The knitting me wasn’t an image ...”

“... cuirassier’. He also acquired ‘a relique of greater moral interest’ which was a gift from a lady ‘whose father had found it upon the field of battle. It is a manuscript collection of French songs, bearing stains of clay and blood, which probably indicate the fate of the proprietor.’ Scott’s combination of romantic excitement and morbid curiosity ...”

“... know either when she begins writing.) In 2013 she won the White Review Short Story Prize with ‘Lady of the House’: the monologue of a young woman who stares from the window of her lover’s home and imagines a monster troubling the stretch of water below. Like Bennett, the narrator of these stories lives in the west of Ireland, in a rented cottage from ...”

“... that too).’ He was, however, open to the idea that it might be a temporary state of mind. ‘A lady of seventy wrote to me about the poem “When I was fifty I felt as you do; now I don’t”. So perhaps we can comfort ourselves with the thought that when death is really near, it won’t worry us. We shall become as thick-skinned as everyone else.’ He ...”

“... the Romantics. It contains multitudes, most famously the late 14th-century tapestry cycle of the Lady and the Unicorn, but it is the site itself, a medieval house built among the ruins of a Roman bath complex, the barely credible survival of two thousand years of use and reuse, that gives it its peculiar resonance. A speeded-up film of Cluny’s history ...”

“... He seems to me to uplift, to be in a comic sense ‘too good for this life’, like the desecrated lady on the poster advertisement for Sunny Prestatyn. Even his fear of death can calm and satisfy ours. (After ‘Aubade’, he had a letter from a lady of 72 ‘saying she felt as I did once but now doesn’t mind’.) But, as ...”

“... She was addicted to childish and ill-judged ‘larks’, which ranged from dressing up as an old lady to do research at a psychiatrist’s to attending a Mosley rally in 1936 in the hope of turning the crowd against him. She was also a psychopath behind the wheel of a car, adding to the perils of the Blitz by volunteering to drive an ambulance. To counter ...”

“... in sex is waning, although substitutes in the form of various massages are available on the NHS. Lady Margaret Hall is the massage centre for Oxford, and in Oxford lives the diarist-narrator Theo Faron, cousin and boyhood friend of the Warden and teacher of history (‘the least rewarding discipline for a dying species’) to the last generation born, the ...”

“... few pages, when she loses her point and joins all the rest of us in our all too real banality. The Lady of Shalott took drastic measures in terms of art when the curse of living came upon her. Lolita survives her enchanting nymphetude, and for a while is as interesting as a dull little wife as she was when presenting Humbert Humbert with his destiny. Brookner ...”