“... wax hardened around them, needed to throw stones at the Irish Literary Revival, led by Yeats and Lady Gregory. ‘The “Irish” Literary Theatre,’ Pearse wrote in 1899,is, in my opinion, more dangerous, because less glaringly anti-national than Trinity College. If we once admit the Irish literature is English idea, then the language movement is a ...”

“... Danish wife with Yorkshire connections, another, with the good Old English name of Waltheof, on a lady from the ruling native family of Bamborough, and placating other magnates like Thorfinn Thorsson from Allerdale (‘mac Thore’ as he is revealingly called in a Cumbrian writ). But whatever Shakespeare may say, Siward’s march on Macbeth in 1054 was not a ...”

“... a popularising approach. It’s devoted to a head-and-shoulders blow-up of the anonymous Italian lady from a Pompeian fresco, good-looking and auburn-haired, who, pen raised to lips and writing-tablet in hand, has so often, and so improbably, been identified as Sappho. At least since the Victorian period, the favourite visual notion of Sappho has been an ...”

“... Ill take it!​ ’ I said, glancing round the empty apartment. The lady didn’t smile or show any sign of agreement. I was beginning to feel uneasy. She’d looked up at me questioningly when I knocked on the open door of her office a few minutes earlier. Something about me must have given me away. The new blocks of flats were in a perfect location, halfway between my village and Nahariyya, a small seaside town in the Galilee ...”

“... who continued to read the description of the Ottoman Empire by the Russells’ contemporary Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and later accounts by Sir Richard Burton or Gertrude Bell, ignored the Russells. A new imperial readership expected ‘serious’ writers like Burckhardt (who was sent to Aleppo in 1809 to study how to disguise himself as a Muslim) to ...”

“... jiggy on a Saturday night. At the Royalty in Southgate, the Goldmine in Canvey Island, the Lacy Lady in Ilford, Raquel’s in Rayleigh, the New Penny in Watford, the kids in their mother’s pussy-bow blouses were getting into what Dylan Jones calls ‘a decade of cultural deregulation’. ‘We all wanted to escape into something that wasn’t really ...”

“... in poems as ‘Like a faun my head uplifted/In delicate mists’, and an imagined lover as ‘the lady in the leopard’s skin’ with ‘roses in her waving hair’. Even in an ambitious later poem like ‘The Analysis of Love’, where the manner of Donne is deliberately invoked, the images have a vagueness remote from metaphysical exactness, as in verses ...”

“... been argued that there may have been something a touch ambivalent about the Nazerene himself; no lady-killer, at any rate. Tom emphatically did not get on with either his father or his mother, but he has and had that in common with many docile and patriotic heterosexuals. Moreover, as anyone with any Foreign Office or SIS experience will tell you, there were ...”

“... once have been, an introduction to Winnie Mandela – who sat silently by – but to a frail old lady of 86, the widow of the former ANC leader and Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Chief Albert Luthuli. It was a master card to play, not merely because of the continuing public ambivalence towards Winnie, but because Chief Albert Luthuli still occupies a special ...”

“... the box, their surgeon and his mate leaning out of the windows, and all of them now joined by the lady on deck, singing Ah tutti contenti saremo cosi, ah tutti contenti saremo, saremo cosi, with surprisingly melodious full-throated happiness.’ O’Brian sustains threads of narrative and develops relationships rather as the voices may be imagined carrying ...”

“... hand and a sharp knife; there is something horrid in his own account of how he cured a noble lady of a drooping eyelid, she calling out while he operated, ‘You hurt me! you hurt me!’ he replying, ‘Remember lady, beauty! beauty!’; but it is hard to see that he was doing anything more than many a respectable but ...”

“... but a series of them. The narrator has just slept with his girlfriend’s sister; ‘a fresh old lady who had never had a bad thought in her life’ appears from down the stair. An old man is intent on confessing something terrible; there’s ‘a fuisty smell of shit which suggests this old bloke needs his bum wiped’. It transpires that at some point in ...”

“... rested. It is fortunate, then, that he makes it clear thoughout this book that he admires the lady – indeed, he goes further and pays her the ultimate compliment of declaring that she is the politician most like him, since she puts country and conviction before party loyalties. Coming from Dr Death, this is of some interest. Moreover, he also makes it ...”

“... there is already a fin-de-siècle air about memoirs of the Thatcher era. It seems so long ago. The lady herself clutches on to a form of political existence more as a menace than a force. She rages, more in reported than direct speech, against developments in the European Community. She has a group of followers on the backbenches who continue to see her as a ...”

“... or a female personification. The Latin god Autumnus was male, but there seems no doubt Keats had a lady in mind. None the less the perfect balance of the poem does seem to depend on a kind of neutral stasis of the sexual and sensual elements within it. Worth remembering, though, that Keats’s feelings and raptnesses were usually far from integrated. He ...”