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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with respectable young women including such ‘notable’ aristocratic beauties as the sisters Lady Violet and Lady Diana Manners, around whom a cloud of eligible beaux constantly buzzed. Carrington’s own family was not grand. Her father had been a civil engineer in India and married late when he retired to ...”

“... that about right.‘We’ve always been the greatest friends’ – that is the kind of thing the lady says about her dentist or accountant, or a woman she’s known for years and years and doesn’t trust an inch. Friendship, like patriotism, is one of those things that has gone off the scale of expression. E. M. Forster managed to combine both in the ...”

“... by the eccentric, neurotic Margery Kempe: ‘hir mende was raveschyd in-to beholdyng of owr Lady offeryng hyr blisful Sone owre Savyour to the preyst Simeon in the Tempyl, as verily to hir gostly undirstondyng as [if] sche had ben ther in hir bodily presens.’ The same scene was enacted in the late medieval religious plays, which Duffy claims had a ...”

“... by his sending ‘a muff of gardenias’ to his niece’s coming-out ball. Her parents, Lord and Lady Glenconner, launched their daughter with Austerity-busting splendour. A marquee, a New Look dress from Dior, a pillar of dry ice and she was ‘out’. Out into what is the question that occupies the rest of the book. What is a well-connected, semi-educated ...”

“... These essays have something in common with Edith Holden’s The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (now available in Japanese and shortly on jigsaw puzzles), which has been on the best-seller list for nearly three years and has sold over a million and a half copies: it has some pretty pictures of cowslips and some less appealing portraits of fat, rather ...”

“... addition, she had been gay, with those big old teeth, long before such time as being gay and First Lady was even conceptual. She, Alison, could not hope to compete in the category of those ladies. Not yet, anyway! A lot of what’s appealing about Saunders is at loose here: his easy way with grandly deployed casual diction, the humour wrung from malapropism ...”