“... 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 ...”

“... costumes and sets – as if it were looking for a slot between Young Sherlock Holmes and My Fair Lady – it has an edge which is entirely contemporary in two senses. It belongs to the actual life of the men in question, not their legacy, and it speaks to concerns of the 21st century, where science looks more like magic every day. What sparks the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... they sit on the beach, Juan tells Chiron the story that gives the film its title. He knew an old lady in Cuba who said that ‘in moonlight black boys look blue.’ These words form the name of the unperformed play the film is based on, written early in his career by Tarell Alvin McCraney. McCraney suggests the piece was always on the way to being a ...”

“... but retired. In the new film, faced with the task of finding and disposing of the child of the lady in the casket, K says, ‘I never retired something that was born before.’ Soon he will find himself saying to his boss, ‘I feel a little strange telling childhood stories since I was never a child.’ But what if he was? What if his implanted memories ...”

“... the Salon, and indeed anticipates by a decade the huge success of Paul Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Gray.It is a relief to contemplate works of art in a church rather than a museum or a crowded exhibition hall, and especially in Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, a masterpiece of 19th-century architecture, or Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which, though classed as a ...”

“... her pursuers in the Mattel building, she finds herself in a secret apartment where a kind old lady, played by Rhea Perlman, offers her a cup of tea. She says her name is Ruth, and we later learn that she is the ghost of somebody who has been dead for years. Mattel created this apartment for her because she was Ruth Handler, who invented the Barbie Doll in ...”

“... is hard to understand. 17 January. The Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker-Bowles come to The Lady in the Van. Normally royalty is guaranteed to put a frost on an audience but their presence peps things up and it’s a very good house. This is because, unlike most royal persons, the Prince of Wales actually laughs and loudly too and so gets the audience ...”

“... beloved of readers and worshipped by his friends; James was 41, known mainly for The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller, examples of the ‘international theme’ he’d mined with such singularity. He was a solitary figure, an arch-stylist who appeared to live as a ghost in the varnished rooms of his own sensibility. ‘Singleness consorts much better with ...”

“... out. I never wore the coat again, though we did smoke the dope. Being grown up and behaving like a lady were the main words of advice my mother had had for me on the way from Brighton to North London. Not such bad advice from someone for whom every new meeting held the possibility of ‘getting somewhere’. A marriage proposal – for her or me, it didn’t ...”

“... The old lady in the Sunday hat was telling her grandson the day was too hot for sale or rent. And just as she said this and wiped the backs of her hands with a Wet Wipe, a dog came padding down the opposite sidewalk before slowing to a halt outside the green house at 83 Beals Street, the house where John Kennedy was born ...”

“... parties, so often been left out of serious histories of past politics? Why have the real-life Lady Glencoras eluded historians? In part, the explanation lies in changing fashions of historical writing. Before the 1960s, when high political history was still intensively studied, the history of women was virtually ignored. Now the position is almost ...”

“... the word processor, a brooding matrix-box far more uterine than penile. Aphra Behn was a shady lady who muscled into the men’s preserve, and was called a whore for her pains. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own fails to make quite clear how truly successful Behn was in her time. She may not have been Judith Shakespeare, but she got play after play on the ...”

“... Ralph Touchett’s gloomy inquiry into the character of Henrietta Stackpole, in The Portrait of A Lady: ‘Is she very ugly? ... A female interviewer – a reporter in petticoats? I’m very curious to see her.’ She believes that the first woman to have ‘recounted world events for posterity’ – a generous definition of journalism – was probably ...”

“... first evidence of that MI5 subversion of the Wilson Government dealt with by famous Peter Wright. Lady Falkender and Wilson had urged Goldsmith to sue – Marnham had unwittingly libelled him by saying he was at John Aspinall’s lunch to decide what to do if Lucky turned up. And so on. Goldsmith is discredited, loses a peerage, fails to buy a ...”