“... response towards not pity or empathy but horror – hence the affinity with Jacobean drama. When Lady Macbeth says she would have plucked the nipple from her infant’s mouth and dashed his brains out, she is remembering Seneca’s Medea – the couple are childless, after all, as Macbeth’s obsession with his future lineage makes plain (there is no ...”

“... It is almost certain that if Trump is elected, Melania Trump will be the first First Lady to have posed for softcore pornographic ‘girl on girl’ photos.African Americans and Jews Trump: ‘Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.’Women As ...”

“... a triple mirror, a mustard pot, a pearl necklace from ‘Grandpapa’, a cheque for £25 from Lady Brabourne, a tablecloth and more. She noted the date the presents were received and the names of the present-givers, from Lady Sligo to Nanny.One of the thoughts the book gives rise to is just how many belongings would ...”

“... knew he could afford to wait. By the early twenties he had got his hooks into that wealthy US lady and money trouble no longer bothered him. His main interest in life was acting the ballocks as grd. seigneuer [grand seigneur]. His jealousy of the patronage Joyce enjoyed is understandable, given his own financial situation. Still, the basis of the attack ...”

“... it’s the corner of Kenilworth Road and Gibbet Hill Road to the south of the university, and the lady sitting on the bench in the background must be waiting for a bus to take her into Coventry. Maybe she’s off shopping, or going to Coventry Market. We’re in a complex, long-established, urban economy here. And the sign isn’t to some vague place called ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... can console us, when we think it over.’ Even in his favourite ice-cream sundae, a ‘white lady’, the hero has found an emblem of disintegration. I watched the white lady melting. Watched the vanilla melt imperceptibly under the topping of hot chocolate. Watched the scoop of ice-cream, almost perfectly round a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... illuminate all men and all women. Poirier’s early study of Henry James through The Portrait of a Lady already urges us to think of Isabel Archer ‘as an Emersonian Becky Sharp’ who chooses to marry a parody of Emerson’s transcendentalist, and only then sees her error. The seed of all Poirier is in one prophetic paragraph that exalts American literary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Brougham had been a terror and a torment in his time. To Lord Sefton he was ‘the Archfiend’; Lady Grey, in a shrewder assessment, identified him with Dryden’s Achitophel. No one, it is true, had ever been able to deny his extraordinary abilities, or the almost frenetic energy with which he applied them to the innumerable objects he had in contemplation ...”

“... realist, operating within the “world” presented in the work’. It is not ashamed to ask about Lady Macbeth’s children, or to speculate on the behaviour and motivation of characters in terms similar to those we employ when trying to comprehend the actions of our associates and friends. Although Nuttall admits that certain of the ideas put forward by ...”

“... gave us a lecture which might have been called – and perhaps was – ‘How many children has Lady Macbeth now?’ But he took enough intellectual lore for granted to get pretty quickly to Hamlet or Coriolanus. If Bateson or Knights had been lecturing to the Conference at Reading, I don’t think they would have reached a poem or a play: political ...”

“... Sense and Nonsense is a 17th-century allegory by Laurent de la Hire. It shows Grammar as a lady seriously engaged in watering some rather spindly potted plants. In her left hand she holds what looks like a very long tape-measure, bearing the words vox litterata et articulata debito modo pronuntiata. Presumably this tape-measure is for checking inch by ...”