“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of national and even international liberalism, devoted in a slightly distant way to his lady, leader of a loyal band of ready and lower-class fighters who are often comic and even a little oafish’. Knight traces these changes through a vast number of texts, from the early ballads and gestes, as well as plays, games, references and songs, through ...”

“... to Catholicism. They included Thomas Harding, a one-time ardent evangelical, and chaplain to Lady Jane Grey’s father. Harding’s much publicised return to Catholicism at the end of 1553 elicited from Lady Jane a bitter tirade as she awaited execution in the Tower, for having become so soon the ‘vnshamefast ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... describing ‘Our Mrs Parker’ in a 1933 Cosmopolitan profile as ‘a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth’. Other friends and frenemies riffed on the theme. Corey Ford opted for animal imagery: Parker was ‘a demure little lady with the tongue of an adder’, a kitten whose ‘sheathed claws were ...”

“... and he started to strip them of leaves and thorns. ‘I am standing at the door here. I see the lady cross. I know her. Often I see her. Always with the children. This time I see her cross the road and the other lady wait with the children. Then, I see the child, the little girl: she calls – and runs. The mother turns ...”

“... of draping paintings may explain the mysterious appearance made by fabric in a portrait of a lady by Bronzino (here miscaptioned as being by Mazzola-Bedoli). A mass of almost transparent silk hangs down beside the sitter on one side and is piled upwards on the other. Thornton describes this as a canopy, but if so, it is a very odd one. He suggests that ...”

“... doubly revealing in its deliberate exaggeration, to social distinctions. Calves, as the lady remarked to the commoner, are a question of ...”

“... of much time spent quietly and usefully. ‘A man cannot hem a pocket-handkerchief,’ a ‘lady of quality’ said to Samuel Johnson one day, ‘and so he runs mad, and torments his family and friends.’ The anecdote is recounted by Mrs Thrale. Johnson, it appears, was much impressed and, in Mrs Thrale’s telling, ‘when one acquaintance grew ...”

“... which has been construed as revealing masochistic proclivities in which he had either involved the lady or sought to do so. The supplementary evidence of the padlock and fetters finds a simple explanation in Johnson’s fear of madness, and the thought that he might need to be restrained: not so much a skeleton in the cupboard as a straitjacket in the ...”

“... why sexual imagery became so constant a theme of attacks on idols. Thomas Bilney denounced Our Lady of Willesden as a ‘common bawd’, and Zwingli complained of the image of St Barbara, ‘got up fine like a prostitute’. The image of the Whore of Babylon, the Romish strumpet, painted in new ways to make her more lovely, allowed a rich proliferation of ...”