“... from predatory hands by turning into nymphs or water lilies or salmon. You, too, can play the Lady of Shalott. Pond etiquette circumscribes photography – this isn’t a place to be Instagrammed, except covertly – but its recent popularity reflects its cultural cachet, both as wellness chic (improve your immunity!) and as a pillar of urban middle-class ...”

“... by Paul and Millicent Dillon after Jane’s death) in a section headed ‘The Third Serious Lady’. The new volume offers brief notes explaining the publication history of the pieces, including one identifying ‘A Guatemalan Idyll’ as the original beginning of ‘Three Serious Ladies’. This conjures up a very different kind of book, much looser in ...”

“... I sneered, ‘Piper is the acceptable face of modern art,’ not realising that at that moment the lady herself was passing through the room behind me. Some of his abstracts I like, particularly a collage, Coast at Finisterre (1961), which is illustrated in the book, and some of his Welsh landscapes. I don’t care for his stained glass, though churches are ...”

“... Indépendants. Wild horses could not have kept them away. A bold pair, armed with a letter from Lady Sackville or Isabella Stewart Gardner, might have penetrated Rodin’s studio. His bronze statue of Balzac in a dressing-gown, shown at the Salon des Beaux Arts, would already have led the travellers to take sides, some finding it disgusting and ...”

“... Few of the great poems of the 1830s and 1840s – ‘Mariana’, ‘The Kraken’, ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, ‘Œnone’, ‘St Simeon Stylites’, ‘Break, break, break’ – show much ‘respect for reality’: these are all poems, as Adam Roberts says in the introduction to his generous paperback, about ‘withdrawal ...”

“... idea to keep me away from my parents, so after they’d stomach-pumped me, they popped me into the Lady Chichester Hospital in Hove. It was a small psychiatric unit in a large detached house, consisting mostly of young people, though none as young as I was. I became the official baby of the bin, and both staff and patients looked after me and tried to shield ...”

“... and the newspapers enthusiastically pumped out this story, painting the mayor’s wife as a Lady Macbeth, the ‘First Lady of Murder’. It was her misfortune that she was good-looking and ambitious. The only part of this story that was true was that the mayor’s wife’s two brothers had worked for the ...”

“... of the shifts in social status and the social fabric that took place after the Second World War. Lady Lacklander in Scales of Justice (1955), asks: ‘Do you find us [i.e. the aristocracy] effete, ineffectual, vicious, obsolete and altogether extraneous? … Some of us are, you know.’ Marsh admits the truth of this as it applies to individuals, but ...”

“... friends, is this?’ – begins the second scene of Twelfth Night. His reply, ‘This is Illyria, lady,’ is our first introduction to the world in which the play will unfold. Many productions have begun here rather than with Orsino’s indolent ‘If music be the food of love, play on,’ inverting the opening scenes to inaugurate the action with the shock ...”

“... house, Bells, nearest post-office Thudeney-Blazes, tries the strength of the sensible grand lady who inherits it. ‘ “Fudge!” muttered Lady Jane,’ who is ‘interested in old houses’ and in travel, like Wharton herself, and who finds out that a Regency ancestor has ill-treated his deaf-and-dumb wife, and ...”

“... a toad to touch, her short nose turns up like a cat’s, and she shines like a bar of soap, my lady with the big lips.) ‘The Goldyn Targe’ also resists convention: Dunbar sets up what looks as if it’s going to be a lengthy Chaucerian love allegory only to curtail the poem’s dream narrative precisely where one would expect it to take off, when the ...”

“... and despite his attainment and adornment of the influential circle at Holland House. Lord and Lady Holland are evoked in the adjuration: ‘think of his possessing Holland House, and that he reposes every evening on that beautiful structure of flesh and blood Lady H.’ But his longing for preferment, which supplies ...”

“... with psychoanalytic theory will recognise connections with the patient’s attitude towards the lady ... and to his mother who was condemned because of her money.’ No doubt it makes Hopkins feel quite grownup to go on in this way, but what is its point? Just what does the money-excrement equation explain? Ernest Jones thought it explained why Britain went ...”

“... are due to improvements suggested by Mr Aspinall. It has been altogether a happy experience.’ ‘Lady Sarah Aspinall has shown exemplary patience with my intrusions, for which I am most grateful ...’ ‘In addition,’ Mr Masters writes, ‘there have been a great number of people who have been willing to share their reminiscences with me, and I trust they ...”

“... would be nice if the Lord sent another flood and drowned the world,’ he wrote to Lady Ottoline. This is the sum of Carey’s quotation. But Lawrence’s letter continues: ‘Probably I should want to be Noah. I am not sure,’ which is funny and human and fallen – not that Carey would have been amused. Lawrence’s comedy emerges in his ...”