“... so that any charger advancing that far would trap its hooves in spokes. It is a great pity that Lady Butler was never able to do justice on canvas to a battle-scene like this. As it turned out, the two world wars offered small scope for wheelmen, but Dodge does well to note the part played by the bicycle in the Japanese advance on Singapore and by the ...”

“... the House of Lords, once exclaimed in grief: ‘I agree with everything said by the noble Baroness Lady Blackstone – a fate I never thought would befall me.’ He will not suffer that fate for much longer (provided Baroness Blackstone follows the Labour Party’s proposed education policy). Labour’s draft manifesto, New Labour: New Life For ...”

“... the Oscar Wilde trial,’ Ashley comments on Corbett v. Corbett in her 2006 memoir, The First Lady, ‘had a civil matter led to such socially disastrous consequences.’ For Justice Ormrod, the case – ‘the first occasion on which a court in England has been called on to decide the sex of an individual’ – was straightforward. Because Ashley had ...”

“... we never know. But his next step was to enter into a contract of marriage with his ward, Elizabeth Lady Lisle, whose title he had taken. Elizabeth was only eight but she was an heiress and the move took her off the market till she grew up, giving Charles the use of her resources. As long as the marriage was unconsummated, Charles could free himself if he found ...”

“... in a single mono-polylogue Mathews would appear successively as serving girl, little boy and grand lady, or Ap Leeks the Welsh gardener and Béchamel the French chef, not to mention the dashing young Captain Grapnell, RN. ‘All the characters are united,’ as one of his playbooks explained, ‘and Mr Mathews has full scope for the versatility of his talents ...”

“... 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 ...”