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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... century than one has any right to expect ... the prioress clearly wants to be thought more of a lady than she is, and the franklin – a rich farmer in whose house it “snowed with meat and drink” – is eager that everyone should know what trouble he is taking to educate his son as a gentleman. These social pretensions, these subtly differentiated ...”

“... be sorry to know that a woman had looked into it past the title page.’ One woman who did was Lady Wilde, Oscar’s mother, an early enthusiast for Leaves of Grass. Another was a lady in Hartford who at once experienced ‘a mysterious delicious thrill’ and wrote to the poet assuring him that her ‘womb was pure and ...”

“... a medical questionnaire to all the women who had attended Newnham and Girton in Cambridge, and Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville in Oxford. They were asked to assess their state of health on a scale from ‘excellent’ to ‘dead’ (some forms were necessarily completed by the families of those who had not survived) at different periods of their ...”

“... for the Northwest Passage in the 1840s only further fuelled the imaginative drama of the ice. Lady Jane Franklin, reminding the nation of her husband’s heroism with her own heroic bearing, whipped up sympathy and money for years of searching which finally located the bodies of the party – though not the remains of Franklin himself. But the drama of ...”

“... are absolutely at home with her disrupted deeps, mingling with them as freely as a society lady with lushes and misfits at a cocktail party. This is shown in a specially graphic way by what must remain her masterpiece, though she always hated hearing it referred to as such, The Death of the Heart. The young Eddie and the 16-year-old Portia live darkly ...”

“... ritualised combat, though in that case the contestants were usually the champions of a cause, or a lady, or simply fighting like athletes for a prize, usually before an admiring audience. He also considers so-called judicial combat, where it was understood that God would determine a just outcome. But divine intervention was not claimed for the duel. At stake ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on them, literally kissing Rayburn’s bald head, endlessly inviting them round so that his wife, Lady Bird, could give them good ole Southern cooking and rescue them from the loneliness they dreaded. ‘Loneliness breaks the heart,’ Rayburn used to say, ‘loneliness consumes people.’ With Rayburn and Russell as a base, LBJ built up his position in the ...”

“... father had died in 1660). He agreed, and remarked in his diary on ‘this Miracle of a young Lady in a licentious Court & so deprav’d an age’. Evelyn drew an altar with a heart on it and a pentacle beneath it, and Margaret inscribed it: ‘Be this the symbol of inviolable friendship.’ Before long he was referring to Margaret in his diary simply by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... liberating from domestic drudgery and the guilt that comes of avoiding it than having a cleaning lady who loves cleaning, a child-carer who’s content with child-care, a homebody who wants nothing more than to be at home. And Martha Freud was all those things. Quite why she was those things is something that her husband might have been the very person to ...”

“... a Hollywood star, then a hard-drinking rabble-rouser, and finally a grand and rather sad old lady with a corgi and a maid living in one of those sadly grand houses in Knightsbridge. In between, she made some pictures. I read a large proportion of this book on a train, sitting opposite a woman immersed in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective ...”