“... 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 ...”

“... two women in the narrator’s life (he refers to his wife as ‘Madam’ and to his lover as ‘my Lady’) have encountered one another with good grace, each afterwards praising to him the attributes of the other: Now, Madam’s faulty feature is a glazed And inaccessible eye, that has soft fires, Wide gates, at love-time only. This admires My ...”

“... mind ‘unforced’. (The first draft was written in a philosophy class and called ‘The Bored Lady’ – the eventual title was ‘Ennui’.) Though simpler, it wasn’t very different from the later poems that would lead Eliot to place her ‘among the half-dozen most “exciting” contemporary European and American poets’. Asked about the poem’s ...”

“... his prime’ At three score ten. But money was not time. ‘I am a mixture of Santa Claus, Lady Bountiful, the Good Samaritan, Baron Richthofen, J.P. Morgan, Casanova. I am tender as a woman, brave as a lion, and can fight like a cat.’ This is the way Charles E. Merrill described himself. In truth, his considerable generosity notwithstanding, he was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the word stretches to untold pleasure or perturbation: ‘Evening pleasant enough; went into some lady’s room by mistake, thinking it mine. Great fuss thereanent.’ Lear’s nonsense is full of mistakes that both the characters and their creator may or may not want to make, and Jenny Uglow’s absorbing new biography brings to the fore the question of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... each tear that falls’. However, Empson argues that ‘falst’ is essential to the idea that the lady has a ‘real presence’ in her reflection. I cannot see why you couldn’t believe that while reading ‘falls’, thus avoiding not pedantry or harshness but nonsense. Empson sometimes gets himself into cantankerous fights without necessity; here his ...”

“... Benevolence is a rare Quality among us. Sensibility indeed we have to spare – what novel-reading Lady does not over flow with it to the great annoyance of her Friends and Family – Her own sorrows like the Princes of Hell in Milton’s Pandemonium sit enthroned bulky and vast – while the miseries of our fellow creatures dwindle into pygmy forms, and are ...”

“... Harvest there was an additional problem because, unlike recent fictional diaries such as Nazi Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs ...”

“... cadenza on ‘spooning’, is oddly prophetic of his metaphoric excursuses on intercourse in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, except that it is subversive of its theme. Having taken Emmy home, Gilbert then ‘goes too far’ in the greenhouse; is interrupted by Emmy’s Dickensian father, but escapes. When Mr Bostock discovers who the seducer is, he sends a ...”

“... Augusta Leigh, and contemplating (over a game of billiards) the seduction of the chaste Lady Frances Wedder-burn Webster, while he confided in Lady Melbourne, suavest of older women, about both. The love of women hardly bothers Byron in his last months. His messages even to Teresa Guiccioli, the last ...”

“... literature. Any self-respecting student can tell you what King Lear’s madness was all about, or Lady Macbeth’s, or even Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ (true madness or feigned?). But I have ransacked the resources of Freud and Jung, cognitive and transactional therapists, Gestaltists, not to mention a highly pragmatic member of the ...”

“... Cassandra bequeathed the scant batch of letters she had saved from the flames to her grand-niece, Lady Knatchbull, whose son, Lord Brabourne, had them published – like precious relics – in 1884. A number of other letters have surfaced since then; the great Austen scholar, R.W. Chapman, issued the first modern edition of the correspondence in ...”

“... to the sanctity of the Aran Islands and the Blasket Islands in Ireland. The attempt by Yeats and Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde to surround the Gaelic past with holiness had loud echoes in the efforts by Catalan architects and artists, from Gaudí to Miró, to establish the Romanesque tradition as quintessentially Catalan while the rest of Spain was ...”