“... say that the look of plain texts does not carry information which has nothing to do with content. Lady Chatterley was prosecuted because she was to be dressed in paperback, and Quakerish simplicity makes one supersensitive to the detail of margins, type and paper. Strong feelings can be raised by these matters, as they can by an inch or two on the length of a ...”

“... she elides dialogue and comment, kidnapping voices to express what an individual would never say. Lady ‘Rogue’ Singleton is courted with a jingling rhyme which dashes her hopes of a glamorous match: Come, wed me, Lady Singleton, And we will have a baby soon And we will live in Edmonton. Her reply has the boom of ...”

“... his continuing search for a father. His mother emerges as a feckless but not altogether unlikeable lady who conditioned her child to moonlight flits from hotels in the Cromwell Road, and who was constantly explaining to his chums, and everyone else, that she had mislaid her handbag and was short of a fiver. On one occasion, Guinness came home on leave to find ...”

“... near what people in this country feel like inside. Coming back from town, I see Mrs Holmes, the lady next door, standing on her doorstep. She shows me her knitting. She’s had migraine badly, so could only manage to cable two-thirds up and knit the rest plain, but it looks fine. She’s lived here for over thirty years, and she’s waiting on the step for ...”

“... rather than in a bargain for sex. Perhaps, but who knows? It is the very invisibility of the young lady, or the impossibility of interpreting her, that fascinated Goethe, as it had fascinated Ter Borch before him. While Steen extended performance to include one and all, Ter Borch here is opting out, as it were. He calls attention in his own way, as Vermeer and ...”

“... rewriting ‘The Jolly Corner’ or possibly even The Turn of the Screw, but not The Portrait of a Lady or The Tragic Muse, much as their subjects would interest her. The claims I have been making – for the whole oeuvre, I should add – are high, and I do indeed think of her as our best novelist. Although she is much admired and giggled at, I doubt if this ...”

“... Sackville-West and Sitwell), topped off with occasional politicians (Astor, Bonham Carter and Lady Lloyd-George) and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera Brittain, Ivy Williams (‘the first woman to be called to the English bar’) and Rachel Crowdy (she ‘belonged to a generation when women had to possess very ...”

“... him to prefer the quietest sort of ruin for the object of his affections’. The young lady, for her part, ‘saw through him, and had not the least intention of being seduced’. This is the kind of fun on the subject which Jane Austen had always enjoyed, and which probably cheered her last days. So far from the atmosphere of Sanditon being ...”

“... the window of a music store in Great Falls when she was 14 and made up her mind. She dried out the lady-killing drunk in him, becoming her stepdaughter’s greatest nemesis along the way. There is a lot more here, told in a simple style just jaunty enough to make it persuasive that Ms McFadden has survived. There is the well-meaning Ila Mae, Pat’s ...”

“... quotes Updike’s The Centaur, in which a white man tells his black mistress: ‘Listen to me lady. I love you, I want to be a Negro for you.’ Cheryl goes to a psychiatrist who diagnoses her as manic-depressive. ‘All negroes were prone to manic depression, he told her. They were subject to frenzied highs, followed by sudden, depressive lows, he told ...”

“... critics, who seem determined to warp Greer’s arguments into the reactionary rant of an angry old lady. What is driving these attacks? Why are her critics so determined to deplore and ridicule? What lies behind the selective misreading that turns a provocative pamphlet, no more flawed than many others of the genre, into a case for the prosecution? Part of ...”

“... who occupied the cradles in the portego?’ Fortini Brown asks. ‘Like any well-brought-up lady, she seems to have practised needlework, for the inventory lists a spinning wheel.’ The familiarity here discourages the scepticism that historians should foster. And how do we know that she herself tended to her babies? When we peer through a window, we ...”

“... figures such as William Godwin – who called her “a piquant mixture between a milkmaid and a lady” – to the elegant Sir Charles Bunbury, formerly the husband of the Lady Sarah Lennox with whom George III had been so much in love before duty forced him to marry his German queen.’ There’s also a Victorianism of ...”

“... letters home on the soldiers’ behalf, soliciting their needs (and occasionally those of ‘lady-nurses’). Among the requests:D.S.G., bed 52, wants a good book; has a sore, weak throat; would like some horehound candy; is from New Jersey, 28th regiment. C.H.L., 145th Pennsylvania, lies in bed 6, with jaundice and erysipelas; also wounded; stomach ...”

“... When we explain how the city works to visitors, we always tell them this story. An eighty-year-old lady who lived alone was not in good health. One day, the water meter, electricity meter and gas meter in the old lady’s apartment hadn’t moved for 24 hours. The computing platform sent an alert to our staff, who contacted ...”