“... too . . . Tears were streaming down our faces but we were just about under control when a lady in the audience said: ‘Ahh, those two must have been really fond of him.’ That our mirth had been mistaken for grief had never occurred to us, and I’m afraid we began to howl with laughter. The audience watched us with deep sympathy. Maria stared ahead ...”

“... is his talk … He will be an Inamorato poeta, & sonnet a whole quire of paper in praise of Lady Swinesnout, his yellow-faced mistress.’ In Joseph Hall’s Satires (1597) there is a similarly disenchanted view of poets who ‘filch whole pages at a clap, for need,/From honest Petrarch, clad in English weed’. He notes that they begin each stanza with ...”

“... solid, sensible instruments one has always hankered after. More ‘artistic’, I suppose. An old lady’s hands, lying idle in a lap somewhere.1 June. Coming to the end of English Pastoral, James Rebanks’s second volume. It’s harder to read than A Shepherd’s Life, with the central section about the onset of factory farming not easy to ...”

“... at trifles can just skip the offending stories and focus on the edifying ones. In short, ‘the lady who is forever saying her prayers or baking … cakes for her confessor should leave my tales alone.’ This is Boccaccio’s greatest contribution to literary theory: vernacularity, writing for entertainment, reader responsibility and the autonomy of ...”

“... underscore the anatomy rather than hide it’. Well, yes, one did not have to be an aristocratic lady to notice that. Another omission from these pages is any discourse on the subject of T-shirts boasting slogans, advertisements, names of bogus universities, jokes and obscenities. The author mentions the way in which designers took to applying their labels ...”

“... tradition and brings to mind the bemusement of the 18th-century Turkish ladies on discovering Lady Mary Wortley-Montague’s corsets and their conviction that these corsets were a kind of overall chastity belt into which her husband had padlocked her before he allowed her to leave England. Ms Johnson has plenty of good ‘foreign’ stuff: the humbly-born ...”

“... an odd crew: an Australian journalist with troubles on the domestic front, an eccentric British lady of means who wants to stamp out female circumcision, a morose American aid worker and a young French girl in search of her father, a network cameraman, who long ago went missing to work in the hills with the rebels. (The last character is based on the ...”

“... do is to imagine someone who is not me, though not someone I know, being 50. She looks like an old lady; the way old ladies currently look. She looks like someone else. I can’t connect me thinking about her with the fact that I will be her in 41 years’ time. She has lived through and known 41 years to which I have no access. I can’t believe I will become ...”

“... of essays on Rivière, and edited by Foucault). And, in an article entitled ‘Quietly, the First Lady builds a literary room of her own’ in the New York Times, Laura Bush assured the nation that ‘there’s nothing political about American literature.’ It’s pretty startling for us fledglings down here, feet on the ground in the real ...”

“... or no, the dictionary is not a book of morals. Winchester records Dr Johnson’s riposte to the lady who noted his omission of obscenities; but British prudery kept cunt and fuck (though not piss, which was biblically sanctified, or shit) out of not only the OED but all other general dictionaries until Burchfield’s A-G volume of 1972, though fifty years ...”

“... prostitute called Pacifica. The even more extraordinary Miss Goering – the other serious lady of the title – develops, despite her fabulous wealth, into the most unlikely gangster’s moll ever. The two friends meet again towards the end of the novel in a New York restaurant as Miss Goering waits for her thuggish paramour to conclude some shady ...”

“... how to play with children? You are mad, we can no longer have you here. You must go.’ Maybe this lady could be offered a job as a publisher’s reader, or a fiction ...”

“... the coffee boil over while groping the chambermaid: ‘Carry up your Coffee boldly, and, when your Lady finds it too weak, and examines you whether it has not run over, deny the Fact absolutely; swear you put in more Coffee than ordinary … because your Mistress had Ladies with her.’ What would Vanessa have made of ...”

“... Cornwell) was an Australian gold rush millionaire, nicknamed ‘Princess Midas’ and ‘the Lady of the Nuggets’, who purchased the Sunday Times seemingly on a whim and installed her lover as editor. She also established the Ladies Kennel Association in 1895, a challenge to the authority of the male-only Kennel Club. (The duchess of Newcastle was ...”

“... where the rector’s wife dumped him on the housekeeper or butler while she confabulated with the Lady Bountiful at the Great Hall. There was some basis to Jeeves country, and PG himself was like Jane Austen and many other people in having some grand though distant connections at one end and ordinary humble ones at the other. None of that seems to have ...”