“... Let Fall,/Most Women Have No Characters at All.’ The opening lines of Pope’s ‘Epistle to a Lady’ could be used to describe Hester’s literary-critical afterlife, a series of affectionate or antagonistic dismissals. James Clifford began his fine 1942 biography with the observation that ‘today, even in the perspective of over a century, she still ...”

“... in the woods, the Grandmother cries: ‘You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got!’   ‘Lady,’ The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into ...”

“... supplies, the less sure we are of what it all means, or meant. Take the case of the Red Lady of Paviland on the Gower Peninsula, the earliest indication of religious sentiment in Britain. Here, in 1822, amateur archaeologists uncovered a headless skeleton, its bones stained with red ochre, buried with bracelets of mammoth ivory and broken wands. Its ...”

“... below the petition are 31 names, the first of which is ‘Elizabeth Russell Dowager’. This lady was, in Laoutaris’s view, the orchestrator of the campaign. She is the countess of the book’s title: the antagonist of Shakespeare in this clash of interests which is also in some measure a clash of class, culture and ideology. She was certainly a ...”

“... House of Windsor. In public, the Prime Minister professes respect and admiration for her sovereign lady and the whole royal family. But it is difficult to believe that in private she offers the same unstinted ‘devotion’ that Disraeli lavished so fulsomely (and so calculatingly) on his ‘faery queen’. As the visible embodiment of stultifying ...”

“... Regency English, Georgette Heyer’s Frederica and the continuation of ‘Sanditon’ by Another Lady. He conducts some tests comparing the idiolects of the leading characters in each novel in his sample with the commonest words in the author’s narration, setting out the results in tables, and in some elegant and expressive graphs. (This is, obviously, no ...”

“... the EDP, asking if she could help. ‘Ma’am!’ Arditi called out, ‘please stay away from the lady ma’am.’ The woman turned pertly to the camera, ‘It’s OK, I’m a psychiatric nurse.’ She marched on across the tarmac. ‘Stay away from the lady! Stay away from the ...”

“... in Scotland, at the house – an open-house sort of house – of his widowed mother-in-law, Lady Drysdale, with whom he and his wife were living. Within a week or two of the encounter Isabella took a trip to the coast, and sitting on the beach, drew up an inventory of her defects: my errors of youth, my provocations to my brothers and my sisters, my ...”

“... family; especially they help to knock two familiar and false generalisations on the head. Honor Lady Lisle – downright, businesslike, self-centred and sensible – would have been astonished to hear that 16th-century women lived a life of helpless slavery, and the loving relations between herself and her much older husband hammer yet another nail in the ...”

“... liberation’. The words are those of the novelist E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady was the ancestor of Bridget Jones. There was a sense of relief at emerging into a world from which the constraints of the Edwardian age had been blown away. The loss of 880,000 men meant that many women would never marry, but they would have the vote and ...”

“... Rosalind, was the daughter of the classical scholar and all-round good egg Gilbert Murray and Lady Mary, daughter of the earl and countess of Carlisle, owners of Castle Howard and much else. Arnold J. Toynbee’s uncle, also called Arnold, had died young in 1883 after a promising beginning as a social reformer and radical economic historian (he is ...”

“... frequent the disguised ‘Goat and Compasses’, and you will perhaps succeed in unveiling ‘Lady Evers’, the socially energetic wife of an ex-Governor of the ‘Laxative Islands’, or ‘Judy Mustard’, whose ecological fervour does not shrink from the extreme of offering her fellow believers home-made wine derived from ‘Purging ...”

“... Imagination was a visitor to pleasure gardens. Anna Margaretta Larpent was a moderately prosperous lady living in London in the late 18th century, married to the state official responsible for vetting plays before they reached the stage. For over fifty years she kept a journal detailing her pursuit of culture: her energetic reading (The Rights of Man before ...”

“... Countess of; bluestockings; Dacre, Charlotte; Edgeworth, Maria; Hemans, Felicia Dorothea; Lamb, Lady Caroline; Lee, Harriet; Lee, Sophia; Radcliffe, Ann: Sévigné, Marie de; Seward, Anna; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft; Staël-Holstein, Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de Worldly, informed and informal, the index is a fitting finale to an edition which extends ...”

“... of Horace’s ‘Quis multa gracilis’ is very different. In this ode the poet imagines his lady, Pyrrha, in the arms of some smooth young man and, instead of raging jealously, pities his rival – the lady will be false to him as she has been to the poet:              O how oft shall he On Faith and ...”