“... against Thomas Seymour, the Lord Protector’s brother, and his marital designs on the 15-year-old Lady Elizabeth, the future (Protestant) queen. She is disliked by the Lord Protector, who favours her elder half-sister, Lady Mary, the future (Catholic) queen. William Cecil, a rising royal secretary, is protective towards ...”

“... college looking for inyenzi. Mukasonga turned this episode into the climax of her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile (2012), which weaves the personal dramas of a group of schoolgirls into a narrative about the disintegration of postcolonial Rwanda. The novel is set in the Lycée Notre-Dame du Nil, a fictionalised version of her own school. The boarders there ...”

“... of human reality is evoked in a wonderful passage from the preface to The Portrait of a Lady:The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million – a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still piercable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the ...”

“... festivities before journeying on. The lord shares the bounty of his daily hunt; meanwhile, the lady of the castle tries to seduce Gawain each morning. He honourably refuses to betray his host’s hospitality.On the last day before he is due to face the knight, Gawain partially succumbs to the lady and accepts her ...”

“... has something to do with virtue. ‘A complete whore’ is the way the victim was described by Lady Victoria Hervey, a socialite who once dated Andrew and later appeared on Love Island.‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Giuffre writes, ‘but I felt I had to.’ All the pomp, tradition, ceremony and ‘loyalty’ in the world can’t wash ...”

“... a garden, vaguely. But she was not gifted in that direction. An African violet which her cleaning lady had given her at Christmas had finally given up the ghost that very morning and she had been forced to hide it in the wardrobe out of Mrs Clegg’s way. More wasted effort. The wardrobe had gone too. They had no neighbours to speak of, or seldom ...”

“... both of the Old Masters and the Moderns: Degas’s The La Danseur, Vermeer’s Young Lady Adorning Herself with Pearls (And Why Not?), Toulouse-Lautrec’s La Belle Epigue and Botticelli’s The Birth of You Know Who. A personal favourite is Jan Van Eyck’s The Marriage of Froggo Amphibini and Giopiggi Porculini, an inferior version of which is ...”

“... so, how is it that they both cite Chekhov as one of the greatest masters of the form. Does ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’, which is probably the most famous of his tales, concentrate on a single event? ‘The Duel’? ‘My Life’? Hardly. As for the poetic quality which is supposed to be peculiar to the short story, is it possible to conceive of prose ...”

“... the mother-figure, who is ‘split’ between the malevolent Morgan le Fay and the seductive lady of the castle, if he is to escape from the stifling environment of home and grow up. Gawain, in fact, turns out to be that painfully familiar figure, the adolescent emerging into manhood, facing and surviving the threat of castration (the beheading) at the ...”

“... to avail itself of the novelist’s feeling for life, issuing in poems like ‘Portrait of a Lady’ which preserved the essence of a novelist’s acumen much as the dramatic monologue preserved the essence of drama. Wilson’s enterprise is a deft turn: infusing the current novel, elsewhere so schematic and teachable, with the specificities and energies ...”

“... chugs of ice ikles on the rops dirte to and Ma get a coff Like a kie in a door woned open: a Lady mises Bussen ded Stut to a door Step frosen and the Skin her face tore of when the Lift her Cobet gone the peles feck him Ma Took the Swize box to a man of Wite Chaple 10 bob its a fare price: and we woke to a fortine Teller That no the Tea Lees in a yelow ...”

“... in love, erupted as a plague of spots. He had already been spotted by a love-affair with a lady who married a Liberal MP, and now he fell in love with Beatrice. There was more than physical attraction on his side. ‘You have it in your hands to make me in the noblest sense, great,’ he informed her. Beatrice had begun to see herself as the ...”

“... and down the coast.It’s as though the silent addressee of Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ – the lady who was told to ‘Come to the window’ so that the coastal landscape, and her place in it, might be explained to her – is being given space to sketch her own picture. The opening poem features a girl with ‘no tongue’, which raises the ghost of ...”

“... came into question. An archery expert was one of many who remarked that ‘undoubtedly the young lady would be injured were she to shoot as posed.’ The sculpture of Diana at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2017. In 2013 she was regilded, a process that took five months and 180 square feet of gold leaf. Even though she was refinished according to ...”

“... than the ‘marble or … bronze repose’ ascribed to Yeats’s religious images. In ‘Our Lady of Youghal’, a lost ivory plaque of the Madonna and Child lies underground but appears to orchestrate its own dazzling rediscovery (‘inside a tower of leaves,/the virgin’s almond shrine, its ivory lids parting /behind lids of gold, bursting out of the ...”