“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that the Robinson sisters and Dacre had been overlooked came in 1875 when they were made ‘lady exhibitioners’. But that didn’t guarantee that their pictures would actually be shown. With their prize money, Annie and Isabel set off for Europe, spending two years in Rome. At some stage Isabel worked for Lord Leighton when he was on Capri, taking ...”

“... In London, too, ‘drink is a great problem,’ Hamnett writes in her second memoir, Is She a Lady? Fry and Sickert told her to slow down, work hard, not get too ‘distracted’ (i.e. drunk). But she thrived in these spaces, and her writing is full of the kinds of incident and encounter that would never have occurred in the other spheres available to her ...”

“... he refuses to kill the emperor. Anna, infuriated by her husband’s lack of virility, rages like Lady Macbeth, fuming that she should have been the man and he the woman. On this scurrilous tale, invented almost ninety years after the events it purports to relate, rests the legend of Anna’s treason. In fairness to Byzantinists, scheming empresses weren’t ...”

“... The townspeople of Levant, her adopted home, are of little help: to them, Vesta’s just the weird lady at the Girl Scout camp. (At least, we think they see her that way – most of Vesta’s interactions with townspeople occur only in her imagination, and the further we penetrate into the novel, the less trust we have in what ‘really’ happens.) Nobody has ...”

“... gallery attendant walked past and was identified as ‘charwoman, char, cleaning woman, cleaning lady, woman’. And ‘sweeper’. The algorithm at work here – developed under the direction of Paglen and Kate Crawford, who researches the social implications of AI – is trained on a dataset called ImageNet, a project launched in 2009 by computer ...”

“... bed, Jewish pink cushions, down ... The soldiers’ crutches knock. Again: ‘Give us something, lady.’ They flop down with their top-knots hanging loosely. They are dressed for war, with their army-issue fur-hats. And their stumps hang down bravely ... The women have brown faces ... None of them has slept. Duvid the Disciple is in his waistcoat and says ...”

“... opposition, his approach was made through the Cliveden set. It was the best contact he had, since Lady Astor’s son David was his friend. Besides, Chamberlain was in power: however strongly Trott may have deplored his stance, the Prime Minister was the man he had to influence. The third reason is this: in order to be able to travel and fulfil his ...”

“... venting of pique will become clear when the new franchises start up in January. Once the lady had been unhorsed, however, the steam seemed to go out of the relationship. Early in the Gulf War, John Major was invited by one of his more neanderthal backbenchers to indulge in a routine spot of BBC-bashing during Prime Minister’s Questions in the ...”