“... make themselves fully as ridiculous as Mrs Trimmer, and are offended even more easily. One good lady, ‘active in several American feminist groups’, has been through children’s dictionaries: ‘two solid days of reading – filled with eyestrain, boredom and outrage’. She finds that John is able to touch his toes, while Ann is not able: John is at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... no generic difference worth the name between, say, The House of Seven Gables and The Portrait of a Lady, or for that matter between Daphnis and Chloe and Ulysses. James admitted that there was no definite boundary between novel and romance, but he knew that in such extreme cases there was no problem telling one from the other. Of course you can argue that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Christian, of sorts. In ‘A Letter from Brooklyn’, from the collection In a Green Night, an old lady writes to the poem’s narrator, ‘in a spidery style,/Each character trembling’, about his dead father and about her confidence in the father’s place in heaven: ‘So this old lady writes,’ the poem ends, echoing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of roughly the right appearance, and to recruit actors to play all the significant roles: an old lady to fry the liver, a balding piano player, a motorbike enthusiast, a concierge. Lives will be lived on repeat while he moves through the building watching and rewatching the same trivial events unfold. While teams of investigators scour likely areas of London ...”

“... flicks past her at the counter and a splash of Sincere coffee fills her cup – Ray is all yours lady! No date no wait no fate to contemplate! he grins. Contour of a person so different from what you can get into bits of speech. His calf muscles for instance were huge. Like a ballet dancer’s. She thought about it walking beside him. Or a bicycle ...”

“... in her son’s back, as Vernon reflects: I’ll tell you a learning: knife-turners like my ole lady actually spend their waking hours connecting shit into a humongous web, just like spiders. It’s true. They take every word in the fucken universe, and index it back to your knife. In the end it doesn’t matter what words you say, you feel it on your ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... might need to earn her own living. Teaching was the only realistic option if she was to remain a lady. For Annie, this was more than an expedience. Charitable work among poor children, another task imposed by her gender and class, persuaded her that she had found a vocation. Those who knew her as a self-effacing girl would have been astonished to learn that ...”

“... oneself taking sides against Jem’s presumption of her family’s specialness. The sweet-shop lady’s irritation, for instance, on board the boat to Canada, is surely reasonable enough? In the souvenir and sweetie shop Harriet starts furiously rearranging the display of sweet rolls and little packets and boxes and so on and the shop woman glares at ...”

“... 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 ...”