“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a long moustache and a Van Dyke beard, smoking an opium pipe. Above my left breast I got a naked lady, a rear view of her squatting, but that one faded. And then on my back I got a chick doing the limbo, going under the bar, with little black panties on. That one came out nice. Just before I got released, I was going to get a vampire. A guy had done a ...”

“... the kilt matches the Havana wrapper perfectly. Here are some samples. Ladies first. ‘Advice to a Lady’ is a poem in which Padilla, like a Cuban Sexus Propertius, or rather a political Ovid, gives her cue to a lady from the Cuban haute bourgeoisie, reluctant to vanish, on how to behave improperly, according to the new ...”

“... rings my agent Rosalind Chatto to tell her that when in last year’s LRB diary I quote an old lady in New York as saying ‘I zigged when I should have zagged’ the original remark came from the American sports reporter Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old ...”

“... said Terry. ‘That’s because she’s never been away,’ said Ballantyne. ‘All over, dear lady. You can get up now.’ And he helped Mrs Donaldson back onto her chair. ‘Ballantyne obviously fancies you,’ said Delia when they were talking in the canteen afterwards. And when Mrs Donaldson pulled a face, ‘You could do a lot worse.’ There had been ...”

“... and seductive war widows fail to wean Louis from his obsession with Madame Laura, the local ‘hot lady’ whose stolen panties he won from a friend as a result of a bet over the timing of the German invasion. There are other things here which might suggest the earthier and homelier version of L’Education Sentimentale, though in The Sorrow of Belgium Louis ...”

“... the most significant of his day, such as Eliot and Lawrence. In 1962 he dined with Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley in Paris, ‘and was much taken with them’, on his way to spending three weeks in the USSR – where his novels sold in hundreds of thousands – as the guest of the Writer’s Union. ‘This is the happiest day of my life,’ he said at the ...”

“... For the Wodehouse archive he is assembling, Edward Cazalet, grandson of the 99-year-old widowed Lady Wodehouse, recently bought, for £175, a short ts. letter from Wodehouse to a Mr Slater, dated 2 July 1953. Mr Slater had asked Wodehouse where Market Blandings was, the station for the Castle, with Jno Robinson’s taxi waiting to rattle you up to the home ...”

“... want. In the series of letters exchanged between Benjamin Disraeli and Frances Anne Vane-Tempest, Lady Londonderry (known as ‘Vane’) there’s an unexplained hiatus. A silence, beginning in 1839, the year of Disraeli’s marriage, and persisting until 1845, overtook the correspondence. Now the gap, on Disraeli’s side at least, is factitiously ...”

“... rules of seduction, he says, with ‘two exceptions. I never deflower and I do not persist if the lady doesn’t want me.’ Regarding one of these statements the present writer’s recollection is slightly different. And then, of course, there is the wine. The reader can learn a good deal about its production and the internecine politics of the growers. But ...”

“... round to see (Steadying her red-sepal hat with the russet-silk flutes) Creamy-armed Hera with Lady Athene (Holding their scallop-edged parasol high) As they wobble their way down the dunes Apollonius of Rhodes, in his Medea-Jason epic, transformed Homer’s goddesses into images of aristocratic ladies of the Ptolemaic court in Alexandria, providing a ...”