“... hyper for Evelyn to encounter her daughter as the evil queen of the multiverse, dressed like Lady Gaga and bent on the destruction of all forms of life, but it is still continuous with the existing problem: Evelyn can’t listen to Joy, and she can’t change her. The same goes for Joy’s own embrace of nothing: extreme, but what else is she to believe ...”

“... horsewhipped him and divorced her with poker-faced disdain and aplomb. He then married another lady of entirely chaste demeanour, with whom and with which he lived in placid self-satisfaction ever afterwards, although they had rather a tiresome time during the German invasion of 1940 and had to retire (for good, as it turned out) to Rhodesia. And oh yes, I ...”

“... the matter up again, when it was all so definitively done and dusted by our very English Iron Lady, who to make things all the more poignant (or aggravating) is now just a shadow of her former self. So too is the British Empire, which persists, against all the evidence, in reimagining itself ruling the waves and capable of decently governing even its ...”

“... going to say I had squandered spring when summer came along and took it from me like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine. But here it is winter, and wrong to speak of other seasons as though they exist. Time only has an agenda in that wallet at his back, while we who think we ...”

“... further still. In Aurora Leigh, ‘that bilious Grimwald’ (a critic) observes the villainous Lady Waldemar:Those alabaster shoulders and bare breasts,On which the pearls drowned out of sight in milkWere lost excepting for the ruby clasp!They split the amaranth velvet-bodice downTo the waist or nearly.Grimwald gives a ‘a low carnivorous laugh’, and ...”

“... Leverhulme called the Neoclassical gallery he built to house his extensive collections the Lady Lever Art Gallery in memory of his wife. It stands among Port Sunlight’s English-vernacular terraces like a grande dame at a village fête. What it contains, however, is a reminder of a time when popular taste and the taste of a rich collector could have ...”

“... Only one brand of handmade cigarette (Morland, three gold bands), one bath essence for visiting lady friends (Floris), one food for dinner (scrambled eggs fines herbes), one newspaper (the Times – ‘the only paper Bond ever read’), even a brand of little pots of jam. Far from being a merciless killer, at times Bond’s hands seem to flap around in a ...”

“... mutual appreciation was a trade-off, in which the obsessed artist got a taste of grace and the lady fraternised with immortality. That she knew he was immortal was an indispensable part of the deal: a useful conjunction of high art and high living has always depended on the second respecting the first as much as the first the second. Another case in point ...”

“... frið sem álfkona, ‘fair as an elf-woman’, and Anglo-Saxons said ides ælfscinu, ‘elf-fair lady’. But they are dangerous too. Elves are ‘cruel for fun’, Granny Weatherwax says in Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies (1992) – another hardline view, denied by some (Tolkien), maintained by others (Keats). They were thought to be wise, even ...”

“... the Ladies: perfumed, decorative and sumptuously furnished; in the middle, Mamouse, the large lady caretaker who sits ‘like the dog Cerberus’ at the gates of hell, watching over her pourboires and her pot of simmering chicken-giblet broth. Prickly’s chief aim in life is to sneak past Mamouse into the Ladies, where behind closed doors, and without ...”

“... a reputation for life: ‘Mazie’, about a woman who sold tickets in a skidrow movie theatre; ‘Lady Olga’, about the sideshow life of a bearded woman; and ‘The Old House at Home’, about a neighbourhood tavern that had been selling ale mainly to elderly gents with Irish names since 1854. Mitchell wrote a lot of other great stories, too – ‘fact ...”

“... and favoured a mewing private language: ‘I began a big pastermiece – a dragon, and a lady in a birthday-suit – for which Dod is going to sit.’ They dressed up as butterflies and bacchantes, and squeaked about sex over cocoa and boiled eggs; Mrs Colenbrander tells us that when Harold and Laura Knight arrived: ‘Their brilliant painting ...”

“... the Berkeley in Piccadilly even allowed unchaperoned female diners. In 1899, a piece in the Lady claimed that thirty years earlier women had almost never dined in public. Only one or two respectable establishments had allowed female customers, and women were expected to be accompanied by their husbands. Now, the writer for the ...”

“... affluent, it is essential to the film that they are middle class, unlike the aristocratic Lady Beldon. Her granddaughter, Carol, becomes engaged to the Minivers’ elder son, Vin, before he leaves to fight with the RAF. After toying with various endings, MGM killed off Carol in an air raid, leaving Vin and ...”

“... life. Sainty’s life is shaped by two powerful women, very different from each other: his mother, Lady Charmington, a heavy-going Presbyterian Scot, whose severe morals and devotion to good works do not wholly conceal more brutal instincts; and Lady Eccleston, Cissy’s mother, a tireless schemer who constructs the marriage ...”