“... an outdoor show called ‘Star Lasso’, desert and mountains behind him. The audience includes a lady with a veil, to whom Ricky makes a special salute. She was an actress as a child, the only other survivor of the chimpanzee attack. A flicker of wind on the veil allows us to see her disfigured face. She might well be a reminder that aliens can be close to ...”

“... resolves spontaneously – is the facial scarring caused by its pocks, of the kind that affected Lady Mary Wortley Montagu after her recovery from smallpox in 1715. The likelihood of finding how the virus got out of Africa is low, and it is too early to tell whether the current outbreak will fizzle out or linger in the MSM network. It is a manifestation of ...”

“... a form of bolero. It’s pleasant and sad, not at all threatening. In the film, an old lady keeps asking Seo-rae to play it for her. It is about getting lost in the ...”

“... 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 ...”