“... excessively strange as when blackthorn blossom turns into ‘the frock on a dark, small, angular lady’. Straining a bit for effect? No doubt, but outrageous metaphor like this keeps you alert. Les Murray is a rarity, a poet with a gift of the gab used not for self-regarding rhetoric but for storytelling, a man writing with unstrained and often moving ...”

“... wrapped in red, yellow, green or blue silk. As a child, Josephine identifies with an Atwoodian fat lady tightrope-walker she sees at a fair, a ‘ridiculous and touching figure’, with ‘the courage to be more than herself, not held back by fear or gravity, twirling herself so delicately into dangerous space’. But when Josephine reads the forbidden red ...”

“... the motionless statues, tramps asleep ‘like litter on the grass’, a de la Mareish old, old lady that nobody knows and a young man who is not quite right in the head. Though he wrote, with great facility, plays, epitaphs, harlequinades, Humbert Wolfe is most himself in the tiny Georgian lyric which turns so adroitly to satire. He took a risk here, as he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... she’d discovered. I’m not sure about Polar Stampede. Assault on the Solar Plexus ditto. Happy Lady, by contrast, is exquisite pictorial comedy with title to match. I was dreading finding the big 1960s paintings overblown – ‘big statements’. Bad reproductions and worse recollections of canvases like Polar Stampede littered my mind. The real things ...”

“... up and down steep hills, to listen to the singing of Amy Shuard; and the portrait of a beloved old lady, a sexy mother-figure, German by origin, who returns to Germany just before the war breaks out and of whose death in an Allied bombing-raid the narrator learns in circumstances which are peculiarly tormenting to him. And finally there is the undoing of ...”

“... than be hunted by mankind until trapped and put in a cage for a young lady to admire: For whan fair freedom smiles nae mair, Care I for life? Shame fa the hair; A field o’ergrown wi rankest stubble, The essence of a paltry bubble. This willingness to toss away life itself in the face of corralling and compromise is evident in ...”

“... to be congratulated on writing extensively about gamekeepers without even a passing reference to Lady Chatterley’s Lover (notoriously inadequate in its coverage of a keeper’s daily duties). It emerges shyly on page 149 that in 1996 the author was presented by a visitor from Australia with a fine gold-plated Ace rabbit trap in recognition of his interest ...”

“... about his non-payment of a very small loan, and next he makes a highly aristocratic marriage to a lady twenty years older than himself. Medlicott’s avatars are amusing enough, yet do not really strike us as leading anywhere, and this is an example of an important law. High talent in autobiography (whether fictional or of the real-life kind) shows itself in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... somnambulists and incubus-sufferers attend summer camp to be cured of their sleep problems. ‘Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows’ is a Peeping Tom parable about two boys who hide under a table to watch an adults-only night at an ice skating rink, which descends into an orgy masked by swirls of fake snow. The stories are about the limits of ...”

“... the North Sands shipyard. The ‘bronchial blast’ of a hooter sounded, startling Macmillan. ‘Lady Dorothy was quicker on the uptake. “When the whistle blows,” she explained, “they all go off for their luncheon.”’ Brien, a native of the region, and indeed of the working class, was not slow to pounce. There are no quotations from Liberace, but ...”

“... than the depiction of people. The portrait of a continent is not the same as the portrait of a lady, say, and neither is a ‘portrait of the times’, the title of a vast and dazzling exhibition of contemporary Chinese art – around 120 artists and several hundred works – at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai (until 10 November), a former power plant ...”

“... 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 ...”