“... dwells on a particular form to tease out the meanings, and not vice versa. Unlike the naked lady next to Courbet in the painting, the beggar woman defeats the male gaze. She doesn’t titillate or arouse, at least not in the usual ways. Take her legs: ‘bare, flabby, pale, unhealthy, yet not without a certain unexpected, pearly sexual allure, the right ...”

“... compassion, or from some interested and unworthy motive. We are asked – ‘Why should not such a lady dance, if it gives her pleasure?’ We answer – ‘It should not give her ...”

“... little, as with the story of the liaison with Lola Montès, but it is pleasant to learn about the lady who announced her readiness to spend the night with Dumas on condition that he would first present her with a mongoose and an ant-eater (the former was not difficult, but where, asks Professor Hemmings, was Dumas to get hold of an ant-eater, short of ...”

“... beside the point – and Reed’s Night Train to Munich (1940) is a sort of ironic remake of The Lady Vanishes, complete with Margaret Lockwood and Naunton Wayne – but Hitchcock is interested in the nightmare of error rather than the death of charity. The Fallen Idol seems a little dated on a new viewing, its images and plot-points signalled too bluntly ...”

“... took a spongebag, Hermione Lee reports, to the Booker dinner. In her letters she uses the dotty-lady schtick for two main purposes. It’s there to entertain and mollify her daughters, on whom she depended for all sorts of things: ‘Marina Warner came to lecture at the Highgate Institute on Tues – embarrassing as the members had made a clean sweep of all ...”

“... Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners. She looks like a nicely brought up young lady, with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ part of her vocabulary. But in her first official portrait by Paul Emsley, unveiled in January, her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off. One ...”

“... and failing to get published the manuscript of a novel, tellingly titled The Poor Man and the Lady. He wrote in his notebook, in October 1870: ‘Mother’s notion, & also mine: That a figure stands in our van with arm uplifted, to knock us back from any pleasant prospect we indulge in as probable.’ Nowadays, we read this metaphysically, in the ...”

“... the pretensions and self-deceptions of those who practised it. St Louis was crawling with would-be lady writers. There was Mrs Stone, the director of the Modern Novel Club, who had written a pamphlet on ‘The Problem of Domestic Service’: ‘Intentions pile up before her like a mountain, and the sum of her energies is Zero!’ Mrs Hull, the wife of a coal ...”

“... and Princess: ‘Arbella Stuart’s notorious rebellion offered the example of yet another royal lady challenging James’s patriarchal and absolutist claims. Never mind that Arbella’s rebellion challenged the interests and claims of the Queen and Princess as well. The suppression of comparisons and distinctions between the women makes each chapter seem ...”

“... prepared in this Town & shall be sent by the [ship] Caesar Templer … My best respects attend ye Lady Shaftesburys.’ That July he sent word that he had also shipped ‘one thousand of Shells in the Happy Return, consigned to Mr Julian Beckford for your use, which I hope safe to hand & that they may answer.’I assume that the shells ...”

“... and a seductress and a schizophrenic to boot.) And what of Katerina Lvonava Ismailova, the ‘Lady Macbeth of Mitensk’, who, though initially less seducing than seduced, having once got the hang of fornication likes it so much that she strangles her husband and poisons her father-in-law (with mushrooms) rather than give it up? Such a plethora of ...”

“... of a stage shepherd to play the pastoral lover. One of the finest portraits is that of Teresa, Lady Shirley, painted in Rome in 1622. The daughter of a Christian Circassian chieftain, she had married Robert Shirley in Persia and is shown draped in a kind of tent of gold fabric – the effect of her clothes is splendidly exotic. Her thin-lipped, quizzical ...”

“... various ladylike adaptations of Eastern philosophies; later the pro-Fascist Jorian Jenks joined Lady Eve Balfour’s Soil Association as well as Kinship in Husbandry, started by the enthusiast for early Nazism Rolf Gardiner; Kathleen Raine converted from a modernist poet to found the Temenos Academy (current patron the Prince of Wales), with its Ten Basic ...”

“... of poems, often seems obsessed by the vis inertiae: ‘Mariana in the Moated Grange’, the Lady of Shalott pointlessly weaving, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, ‘Tithonus’, the endlessly dozing kraken which self-destructs as soon as it tries to do anything. I can’t come up with a Tennyson poem that doesn’t seem to glance at procrastination, aside from ...”

“... from Symi. They’d had to climb the island’s 328-foot rockface to get to safety. ‘The old lady kept pleading with me for water,’ Fadia said. ‘“Just give me a tiny drop,” she’d say. And I had to say: “Sorry, we don’t even have a teaspoonful.”’ ‘After we’d been there five hours in the boiling heat, we managed to wave down a passing ...”