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“... Galway dialect, or in Biblical language? Certainly not in the style of Esther Waters, ruled Yeats. Lady Gregory tried to be helpful. When Moore decided he would rather write the play in French, Yeats thought this an excellent idea. As Gray explains, Lady Gregory could translate Moore’s French text into English; Taidgh ...”

“... was shrewdly described by Woolf as ‘a very extraordinary cross between Moll Flanders and Lady Ritchie, between a rolling and rollicking woman of the town and a lady of breeding and refinement’, a satirical lady perpetually outrunning distress. But Clarke points us to a more ...”

“... Sitting in Waterlow Park the other afternoon, I heard a park keeper ask an old lady with a transistor, ‘What is happening in the Cup Final?’ – to which the old lady replied: ‘Which one do you mean – the one at Wembley or the one at the Falklands?’ The park keeper returned: ‘Wembley of course ...”

“... In 1951 Lady Diana Cooper turned up at a ball in the Palazzo Labia in Venice dressed as Cleopatra. The choice of costume was perhaps predictable. On the walls of that Palazzo is Tiepolo’s painting of an outrageously haughty Cleopatra, attended by her male servants. And it was this fresco, copied faithfully (apart from its exposed breasts) down to the last jewel, that provided the model for Cooper’s outfit ...”

“... of the few women characters in the play acquire an added urgency. Two actors – Sharon Rooney for Lady Percy, and Zainab Hasan for Mistress Quickly – made their impressive stage debut here (also doubling as Gadshill and the Doctor respectively). When Lady Percy pleads in vain with Hotspur not to desert her, her children ...”

“... large, the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. The introduction is written by Jane Ewart-Biggs. Lady Ewart-Biggs speaks for those throughout the country who listened with growing dismay to the debate in Parliament on 3 April 1982 which culminated in the despatch of the Task Force with all-party support. Those people thought in terms of men and families, not ...”

“... had one of those dreams where one is furiously trying to find something. It reminded me of an old lady my mother used to know, a Russian lady. Her English was never very good. Speaking of her wedding she once said something to me, with a dry little cackle of laughter, about what sounded like a pot of basil. Could that be ...”

“... distinction and were liable – except when the mask slipped, as Margot’s did – to exaggerate: Lady Frances Balfour believed they had ‘something of the effect of the Restoration on Puritan England’, though this was only ‘a rough analogy’. The difficulty lay in proving it when, as Lady Desborough mournfully ...”

“... the loveliest basket of warm desserts. A-monk-a-monk-a-me, a-monk-a-monk-a-yoo I once knew a lady wot lived in a shoe Had so many laces she didn’t know wot to do So many laces, faces, places … Wot’s a girl to do? I jibber-jabbered, jibber-jibber-jabbered myself to a proper lather and whipped that lather into a nice thick batter and baked up a ...”

“... of Mr B—. It teems this Gentleman had conceived a violent Affection and Attachment for a Lady, whom he had the Misfortune of meeting accidentally at the above Concert, during which Representation the company were frequently disturbed by him.   After the Concert was finished, he rudely forced his Company into the Room, where the ...”

“... however, some idea of the shape of secret longings and less secret discontents does emerge. Lady Craven, travelling to Constantinople in the late 1700s, ‘never saw a country where women enjoy so much liberty … as in Turkey’, where they were also ‘perfectly safe from an idle, curious, impertinent public’, and even from their husbands, for ‘a ...”

“... relationships. Vinnie models her behaviour on theirs, and hopes to be taken for an English lady. As her punning name betrays, she is at once a miner, a delver underground, and a minor, or arrested child. In American terms, this is deviant behavior and the uselessness and regressiveness of her specialism has not gone unnoticed back home. At the airport ...”

“... in youth, and remained in the habit of keeping a mistress. He admired the celebrated beauties Lady Hamilton and Lady Oxford, and in 1801 was described as ‘philandering’ the latter down the Wye. Lady Oxford already had a liaison with Sir Francis Burdett, as she was later to have ...”

“... ingeniously as the screen scene in The School for Scandal – uniting the crisis of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle’s marriage with the contest between the hypocrite Joseph Surface and the ne’er-do-well Charles in the single moment when Sir Peter and Charles fling down the patterned screen in Joseph’s library, exposing the hidden ...”

“... Women’ using her blood for ink and her flesh for paper Lytton hoped to prove that she wasn’t a lady of privilege but an ‘awkward customer’ who didn’t deserve special treatment. It wasn’t an easy operation: her ‘skin proved much tougher’ than expected, she later recalled, and ‘suitable tools’ were hard to come by. The prison provided inmates ...”