“... where sat the cast of ghouls who ran the operation. Transmission times were decided by a dragon lady called Madame Awatiff, who had a voice that could cut through steel, wore saucer-size glasses magnifying her eyes and dressed in glamorous Fifties frippery. She responded best to flattery. The chief censor was the aptly-named Dr Saad, who derived a perverse ...”

“... Jennifer Potter’s title takes place in the Arabian sands. It’s made in 1910 by Elinor Grace, a lady archaeologist intent on reaching the site of Mareb, thought to be associated with the Queen of Sheba. At first it looks as if Miss Grace is simply an intrepid and eccentric Englishwoman of the period, used to overawing inferior races by upper-class manners ...”

“... the monstrousness of mass unemployment on starvation levels of relief. Somehow the spectacle of Lady Astor seeking to instruct penniless women in the art of making a nourishing soup out of hot water and a few carrots seemed even more offensive than plain indifference. Needless to say, such moments were fairly rare, since a good deal of Parliamentary ...”

“... story is of how, in December 1938, a biographer of George Eliot received a letter from an old lady of 85, Ethel Welsh, née Lewes, confidently asserting that she was the daughter of George Henry Lewes by his wife Agnes, and that any suggestion that her mother had behaved improperly was false: ‘My Mother was a most perfect Mother.’ Ethel had also loved ...”

“... Zahl for whom Rose works. The violent end of the affair leaves Rose as nurse-companion to the old lady – a caring role which she vainly sought when she first went to New York. Sustained by the indulgent company of the regulars at her Fulham pub, and having made her confession, she seems happier with herself, at last. It’s been a long haul, however, and ...”

“... daisy flower’, a deft blend of elevated tone and low purport, where the lover dozes off and the lady slips away to find somebody more easily aroused. ‘Thus after her cold she caught a heat’: well might he sigh, well might he groan! ‘Hierusalem, my happy home’ is missing (Quiller-Couch dated his version 1601), and so is George Herbert, who was only ...”

“... an Oxford college. A more plausible scene would have him growling greetings to the black cleaning lady at a quarter to six in the morning of a dreary January, as he comes in to finish an article about the night soil trade in 18th-century London, in an academic institution that is only just managing to contain him. And he it. Porter’s industry has taken him ...”

“... in opportunity or pay did not worry her. She did, of course, get reviewers who wrote about ‘lady novelists’ as if ‘gentleman novelists’ were sexless, but these were mere flea bites. Naomi’s demand to express female experience in full, the approach which shocked publishers, reviewers and the respectable of Carradale, came from her emancipation ...”

“... like that accent. Please don’t come slouching near my bed again.’ So, real cool, I growled ‘Lady, no way you’ll walk right over me.’ Dead on. I chucked her then.                  ‘Waftage: An Irregular Ode’ The language flows as simply as blood from a wound, but how multifarious it is, borrowed and pieced together, now like a ...”

“... zealotry rule – a kind of tenth-reich Thatcherism. The heroine of Against a Dark Background, Lady Sharrow (‘I’m a fucking aristo, creep,’ she chides one underling who forgets her title), has been orphaned by Huhsz assassins. The Huhsz is a mixture of cult, multinational company, and clan, whose motives for wanting to go to any lengths to destroy ...”

“... when you have swayed from duty or from even your normal stroll beside me to bound away after some lady dog’. After Tintin’s first taste of passion, melancholy is not long establishing itself. The souring of his romance (‘You were delightful when innocent,’ says Clavdia, ‘but you’ve grown too solemn’) is accompanied by a profound political ...”

“... equal political rights with men, feminists often regard it with scepticism. Yet both the career of Lady Diana Spencer, and Angela Levin’s study of the Princess’s father and stepmother – a classic of its kind – demonstrate that, at this level at least, female influence deserves analysis. Raine Spencer (recently transformed into a French Countess) was ...”

“... fifty thousand came to pay tribute in the hall of the state Legislative Assembly. The first was a lady of 84, but most were young. Girls wrote his name across their foreheads and painted the colours of Brazil on their cheeks. President Franco, falling in the opinion polls five months before a presidential election and perhaps alarmed at the division that’s ...”

“... at the funeral service ‘his side-whiskers and the hair on his head were carefully cut off by his lady admirers’ – but it was finally achieved by Dostoevsky, in his famous speech at the ceremonies that accompanied the unveiling of the Pushkin statue in Moscow in 1880. Dostoevsky hijacked the poet for his own ideological ends. Unique among all the poets of ...”

“... not simple. Years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, I was friendly with an eccentric old lady who one day gave me a book of her poems. She had not written them all, she explained. Some had a P at the end, and they had been written by her friend, a little fairy called Pipplepopple. I must not laugh, she added quickly, or Pipplepopple would be ...”