“... 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 ...”

“... sounds like it’s actually over, that’s probably because he decided early on not to let the fat lady out of her dressing room. Different Every Time, Marcus O’Dair’s fascinating authorised biography (Serpent’s Tail, £20), explains how much Wyatt had going for him at the outset and why the music is good. For a start there were his parents: his ...”

“... the absurd juxtapositions of Malevich’s ‘alogist’ works, such as Cow and Violin (1913). In Lady at the Advertising Column (1914), floating signs appear among colourful geometric forms that clearly prophesy Suprematism. There are premonitions, too, in Malevich’s designs for the avant-garde opera Victory over the Sun (1913). Here, much of the impulse ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have made of the image.Lilith also fascinated the Pre-Raphaelites. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith, she is an auburn-haired beauty admiring her image in a mirror, surrounded by roses and poppies. Rossetti wrote a sonnet to accompany the painting, where she is the ‘witch he [Adam] loved before the gift of Eve’, absorbed in her own ...”

“... offence, not a civil one, however, and carries a term of imprisonment.The Conservative minister Lady Williams told the House of Lords that these provisions were aimed at ‘the sorts of tactic we saw from Insulate Britain last autumn’ (when they blocked the M25 and other major roads). We can trust the police to enforce them proportionately, she ...”

“... Carey’s excremental vision (here’s mud in your eye) gets blurred: ‘Cracking-packing like a lady’. Not much of a wise-cack. Can anything be trusted? Perhaps Anon (it is hard to check) really ended his ‘Ancient Mariner’ with the lines A sadder and later man     I rose the morrow morn, but it would have been wiser of her or him not perversely ...”

“... for sale in the back pages of Sotheby’s catalogues. There is also a wonderful description of the lady who sold him a pup – in this case, a dining-table. Fate does not forgive. A few months later the artful vendeuse was found in her own garage, headless, handles footless and run over five or six times by her own car. It was strongly rumoured, Dirk ...”

“... to his later creation of elaborate works of art. His best feats perhaps are his killing of Lady Agatha, the suffragette, and of the ancient vicar, bumped off out of dynastic sequence because Louis decides his being so boring qualifies him for early dismissal. Agatha is distributing leaflets from a flying balloon. Louis punctures it with a shot from a ...”