“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to A Room of One’s Own, a riposte to Woolf somewhat influenced by the work of Our Lady of Straw, Camille Paglia. Our discoveries of female poets of the past, Greer claims, are not real discoveries. The women writers who have been picked up will soon be put down again. Seldom do they have any lasting power, or any true or great poetic ...”

“... was, in fact – and had been for years – a great lover of pickled eggs. There is an old lady hot dog seller in the Strand who looks just like a hot dog, with onions for ear-rings. There was the bloke I met in Durham Cathedral two months ago who looked like the stone gargoyles he professed to adore, and in Strathclyde I know any number of old folk ...”

“... personally to have persuaded Churchill to recall Spears from the Levant. And he affronted and hurt Lady Spears, the Chicago-born writer ‘Mary Borden’, who had brought the Hadfield-Spears Ambulance Unit, fully equipped and herself its nursing boss, to the French Armies in the bitter winter of 1939-40, and headed it and its vehicles, with Union ...”

“... of her sister, had used her earnings to help smuggle 29 Jews out of Germany. Forgotten now was Lady Josephine Clarke (Errol Fitzgerald) who had retired hurt in 1951 when her 52nd novel, Unwanted Bride, was returned unwanted. Boon retained editorial control. Under the new regime those authors who felt their talents and integrity had been impugned by ...”

“... just as they accept that Mrs Thatcher, in becoming a tough and warlike leader, had perforce, like Lady Macbeth, to unsex herself, an assumption fatuously confirmed by President Reagan some years ago when he called Mrs Thatcher ‘the best man amongst us’. Though Caroline Blackwood finds the militant lesbianism of a few of the Greenham women regrettable ...”

“... of Genji, when she joined the entourage of the Emperor’s daughter in the combined capacities of lady-in-waiting and literary lion. Her Diary of (chiefly) court life is, Mr Bowring considers, more probably a reconstruction in tranquillity than a compilation of day-to-day entries. It opens, in 1008 AD (Kanko 5 in the Japanese calendar of the time), with what ...”

“... he and Oscar were on bad terms ‘he came to me like a wounded stag, and I took him in.’ Lady Wilde, his mother, appears to have exerted a strong influence at this crisis: she imagined him in the dock, defying the authorities rather like Robert Emmet, and she said she would never speak to him again if he fled the country. She was a famous patriotic ...”

“... to the train from London to Northampton, he was treated to six summer weeks in a cottage on Lady Knightley’s estate, from which he sent Treves bunches of common wildflowers that were to him as exotic and wondrous as the Victoria regia lily. Only Treves knew that his condition could only grow worse. Within four years, though he was unaware of it, the ...”

“... her vagina. His mother is a successful faith-healer, assisted by a Red Indian spirit guide and a lady from the court of Marie Antoinette. (Do they never come from less celebrated areas, like, say, the Windward Isles or the court of Henry III?) The father sells a popular placebo, made of garlic-flavoured water, and this helps to finance the spiritualist ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the back of the Bunter residence. David Hughes even devises a comic genesis, involving Bunter, for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Billy Bunter? ‘Bunter,’ states Hughes’s narrator firmly at the start of the novel, ‘was a character in a schoolboy paper called the Magnet. He came on the scene in 1908 when he was 14 and vanished from it, having added not a ...”

“... as a peripatetic stud on the books of an agency called Self Service. The agency is run by a butch lady called Victoria Self, who wears hausfrau braids and a blue serge suit, and who hints at painful punishments awaiting those who infringe the rules of her exotic craft. This is one apparent strand in the plot. Another is that PB, an operator so unabashedly ...”