“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pages of fiction. The whole ambience of shady dealing and social climbing is recognisably that of Lady Metroland alias Mrs Beste Chetwynd. The penniless, pleasure-loving, socially ambiguous American girl, launching herself on society with only her wits and her dress sense comes straight from Edith Wharton. The helpless, boneheaded, inarticulate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... two men shouted to the sentry post: ‘Say something!’ At 10.15 a.m. at Wolliner Straße, an old lady threw a bag of oranges over the wall. At 1.13 a.m. at Korsörer Straße, two men threw a pack of cigarettes (brand Ernte 23) over the wall, saying: ‘You can smoke these.’ At 5.15 p.m. at Schulzestraße, a sixteen-year-old boy on the S-Bahn platform ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a Japanese Tony Curtis and a marvellously sinister woman, played by Isuzu Yamada, who recalls the Lady Macbeth figure from Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. At one point the keeper of the town’s sake shop, where Sanjuro spends much of his time, asks him if he has scripted the whole drama that is now unfolding between the two gangs. Sanjuro says, with scrupulous ...”

“... term, though, he threw away what advantages he had: thus the painfully obvious invitation of Lady Thatcher to tea and the even more obvious visit to Basra. He did badly what Blair would have done with panache. What finally threw Brown’s government off balance was the issue of owner-occupied houses and their taxation. Promising to eliminate death duties ...”

“... painting at Daureb, in present-day Namibia, he claimed it depicted a Minoan or Egyptian ‘white lady’, painted by a visiting Mediterranean artist, and that the local Khoisan people had later ‘blackened’ other figures at the site. He simply couldn’t conceive that work of such extraordinary quality could have been made by hunter-gatherers in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Islam. But a few moments’ thought should begin to correct this. From the 11th century of Lady Murasaki and Sei Shonagon (that is to say, from the birth of the novel as a literary form), women not only had a central place as commentators on the world: they also put men conspicuously in their place. The Tale of Genji is full of cleareyed – even ...”

“... I thought I saw a butter-pat Upon the Sussex down. I looked again and saw it was The Lady Mary Brown. And are you standing up? I said, Or are you sitting down? When he died, the Times obituary set itself to demonstrate that ‘there was no corner of the globe into which Lord Mersey had not penetrated, no adventure that he had not ...”