“... 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 ...”

“... with a picture of the Virgin Mary and a phone number on the back where she can be reached: ‘Our lady has granted her presence to people just like you.’ The Virgin Mary is their good fairy and stern mother. Like their real mother, she denies their sexuality, their changing bodies; only in death can they be immaculate. Jeffrey Eugenides writes well; his ...”

“... spring from a conscious mature assessment. It was in a despairing mood that they submitted to the lady and paved the way for the first woman prime minister in Western Europe.’ Then, to make matters worse, she isn’t the sort of woman a woman ought to be. Mr Abse doesn’t actually say that every woman should stay at home, look after the children and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... away from the marvellous texture of the poems by making them into performances.’ Her kind was Lady Lazarus, the come-back queen. ‘I do not want to be known as the mad-suicide poet, the live Sylvia Plath,’ she told her students at Boston University: but she auditioned for the role and rehearsed it in book after book until she wrapped herself in her ...”

“... destroy all one’s judgment – turn one into an ape.’ For an upper-middle-class young lady, born in the reign of Victoria, these were unusual sentiments. Song of Love provides a much clearer picture of Noel’s character than could be seen in the documents previously available. She told Rupert that when she was a child Edward Garnett had looked ...”

“... globe, commonly by readers who couldn’t begin to negotiate them in the original. Cervantes and Lady Murasaki have the gift of universality. What, then, does the Chin P’ing Mei have to offer the general reader? In its first volume, anyway, the book achieves one of the primary goals of satire, creating characters of sufficient vexatiousness that the reader ...”

“... the publication in ten years’ time of a spate of works of self-justification: Not One of Us by Lady Grantham, Going Down with the Ship by Sir Ian Gilmour, The Non-Playing Captain of the Wets by Lord Whitelaw and The Broken Reed by Messrs Sherman and Strauss. We shall have to wait until Willie tells the story of his encounter with Margaret in a room behind ...”