“... a little bit of a verbal battle and he wound up calling me a tyrant. What he did was to take this lady who ran the little apartment house in Las Vegas where Perry Smith [one of the killers] had been, and fictionalise her way out of character. Accuracy was not his point … It was probably an insignificant thing, except I was under the impression the book was ...”

“... It is framed by a series of undated, unlocated first-person replies from an anonymous, rather arch lady to those asking for funds and support. Like a Chinese box, each letter contains within itself versions of other letters the writer has received and drafts of the replies which she may send. ‘The fiction of the letters’, in Naomi Black’s phrase, acts as ...”

“... estate (two of them black). His luggage included a pair of greyhounds, a dog and a bitch called Lady (for hunting); a skiff (for netting marine specimens); a vast quantity of paper (for dried plants); glass cases, boxes and bottles; high-end optical instruments; fishing nets and tackle; a small arsenal of pistols, rifles, shotguns and ammunition (for sport ...”

“... continued to live with her mother (visiting her husband in Munich at weekends). And when the old lady died, in 2000, Jelinek stayed put. It’s hard to know what was stranger in this set-up: the fact that she could write without inhibition under the daily supervision of her monstrous mother, or that her mother continued to do her daughter’s washing and ...”

“... which can never be lost again’. As early as 1823 a tribute poem addressed by a ‘young lady’ to her ‘married sister’ appeared in the Monthly Review, which announced that the Vale of Avoca was already ‘famous in song’: ‘Sweet vale of Avoca!’ our tongues were repeating, While our eyes from the bridge saw the two rivers meeting. After ...”

“... In Alvin Kernan’s book The Death of Literature there is an account of the Lady Chatterley trial. It sports a pointless and omni-directed superciliousness so relentlessly predictable that if, for example, Rebecca West is cited making a perfectly tenable statement you can rely on being told that she was displaying ‘qualities that must have once made H ...”

“... a passage from Macbeth, an echo scholars have missed. After murdering Duncan, Macbeth tells Lady Macbeth that his grooms woke up briefly and cried ‘God bless us!’ and ‘Amen’, as if they ‘had seen me with these hangman’s hands’ – that is, hands bloody after disembowelling someone who is being executed for treason. ...”

“... in terms that resemble Yeats’s poems about Coole Park, the home of his patron and collaborator Lady Gregory: Great people lived and died in this house; Magistrates, colonels, members of Parliament, Captains and Governors, and long ago Men that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne. Some that had gone on Government work To London or to India came home to ...”

“... on the rapid juxtaposition of high and low, the flight of fancy and the thump to earth. Here is Lady Anne Pantry, the bishop’s wife, musing on Ashringford Cathedral:And the cathedral was very perfect indeed. How admirable, through the just sufficient drapery of the trees, were the great glazed windows that flashed like black diamonds in the sun. The ...”

“... Dürer supposedly wrote during his second visit to Venice in 1506: Then I realised that the lady herself was no longer young, but well past the age of childbearing, and that her narrow brown face had the finely quilted texture that you see on the faces of ageing women in hot countries. Her robe was leaden black and the dress beneath was neither blue nor ...”

“... spinster mused, realising that it was a state she herself would never attain. For the maiden lady, her claim to a home was ‘no less significant an idea for being a memory’ or simply an unrealistic but invaluable illusion which she kept well hidden, except in the intimacy of her journal. Such a woman was wise to have relatively few possessions, a ...”

“... examines in rich detail the rediscovery of Britain’s Gothic heritage, with its cult of the ‘lady’ as the embodiment and guardian of chivalric values. Some women writers, such as the novelist and critic Clara Reeve and the translator Susannah Dobson, seized on this image as a vehicle for their cultural aspirations. Others, notably the republican ...”

“... parcel protocol flashed into his mind. He muttered ‘Bomb’. ‘That’s no word to use to a lady, you naughty old thing. Look, it’s a book. I don’t think we’re up to it today. I’ll just put it here next to your tooth glass.’ When the nurse had left the room he ignored the rubbery hospital eggs and the dark liquid that they passed off as coffee ...”

“... and engaging realistic world is invaded at a certain point by fantastical elements: an old lady fishing by the Thames seems to know Holly’s name and her future; in an underpass Holly hallucinates her little brother Jacko; worse follows when two strangers who have taken her in are found slumped on the ground, their eyes open and their pupils ...”

“... and politicians committed to human rights. Foreign policy was largely determined by what ‘The Lady’ had to say. Now there are bigger strategic and commercial interests in Myanmar, and her hold over Western governments has loosened. But in the inevitable cacophony that will follow election day, her voice will sound loudest. So it will be ...”