“... been missed. The discussion of Colbert and the arts draws heavily on an excellent old monograph by Lady Emilia Frances Dilke: some readers might have liked to know that Lady Frances (née Strong) was once the wife of Mark Pattison, and was widely believed to be the original of George Eliot’s Dorothea Casaubon. The First ...”

“... Paradoxically for one who lived an intensely private life, she was perhaps best known as the lady professor who had flashed across the tabloid headlines by marrying a taxi-driver. Less sensationally, she sat as a lay magistrate for more than forty years, was a sparkling panelist on popular radio programmes, and contributed to numerous select committees ...”

“... limited-edition collector’s items that this book describes? In Britain it was not until the Lady Chatterley trial that ‘the masses’ were permitted to read a work formerly deemed pornographic. The celebrated question posed by the prosecution counsel – ‘would you be willing for your wives or servants to read this book?’ – reminds us of the ...”

“... about English social class, undermines preconceptions with unobtrusive relish. Cicely, a modern lady of the manor, impulsively rescues an elderly couple having a miserable picnic on a busy lay-by, and sweeps them away for an afternoon’s entertainment in her very sophisticated garden. Cicely is generous and cultivated: so is her family. Arnold and Gladys ...”

“... out merely to be ‘mashed bananas and chunky peanut butter’. He first masturbated while reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover – a classy vehicle to inaugurate the venerable habit. Art-historical parlour game: hypothesise the circumstances of the first time Cézanne masturbated. (Or Nadar. Or Duchamp. Or Arbus.) Not yet sexually self-aware, Mapplethorpe ...”

“... How does someone of Doris Lessing’s uncompromising intelligence turn into a little old lady? Not easily, especially if body conspires with mind in refusing to retire gracefully. ‘Most men and more women – young women afraid for themselves – punish older women with derision, punish them with cruelty, when they show inappropriate signs of sexuality ...”

“... a new problem. A parable has it that a cosmologist was approached after a lecture by an old lady, who informed him that what he had spoken was great nonsense, because she knew that the earth rested on the back of a huge turtle. Then on what, the cosmologist asked, did the turtle stand? Why, another, even bigger turtle, came the reply. But what ...? The ...”

“... there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?’ So says Lady Thomasina Coverly, the heroine of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, to her tutor Septimus Hodge. Her question was echoed a century after her (fictitious) life by the unorthodox biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose mathematical investigations of the living ...”

“... up her illegitimate child. In one scene, Esther, employed as a wet-nurse by a Mayfair society lady, is refused permission to nurse her own sick child for fear that her employer’s baby will wake and cry for milk. Esther defends her baby’s right to exist and tells the frantic Mrs Rivers to nurse her own child. And then the Rivers baby begins to ...”

“... restraint and the opulence of nature. Restraint represented by the peaked architecture and the old lady for whom all passion is spent; opulence, by the line of trees, the sky, and the marvellously buxom young lady sitting on the edge of the porch, not waiting for anything in particular, yet fertile and sure in the movement ...”

“... idea of Eliot’s poetry.’ The immediate source of the motif is Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’, where the lady is quoted as saying: ‘Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the Spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful, after ...”

“... those expatriate Italian circles of the 1850s, ‘that strange sisterhood’ of American ‘lady sculptors’ and ‘the queer little kingdom’ of Cushman’s theatrical world. Marcus notes that James may have drawn on Cushman’s menage, in heterosexual guise, for Charlotte Stant’s quasi-incestuous marriage to the father of her lover’s wife in The ...”

“... When Chekhov died in the German town of Badenweiler in 1904, at his bedside with his wife Olga Knipper and the doctor was a young Russian friend called Rabeneck. Thirty-three years later, Rabeneck sought out Olga Knipper, then on tour with the Moscow Art Theatre, in a Paris restaurant. Olga recognised but did not acknowledge him: on either side of her sat an ‘archangel’, a Soviet watchdog ...”

“... trades of husbandry and childbirth. You wove grass and printed flowers on earth. I have found you, Lady Lion, hot and dark. V Outcomers My Mum tucked her nightdress across her dark red, riddled and swollen breast, painful, stark bag of curds that suckled me.                              In the warm fog, as I walked the road towards ...”

“... steering wheel.– So who’s that little broad with the freckles and orange hair?(Lord God-Lady, forgive me, forgive Murph: Flatbush Ave., Brooklyn,Born the same day as that misfortune with the Arch-Duke, right?)– Maxine, I say. – Are you doing her? – Christ, Murph, I’m only 14!This plainly displeased him. You could say Murph was my unofficial ...”