“... was still on when he returned at 5.45, indicating that Alison had not yet arrived home. From the lady in the downstairs flat there was more significant testimony still. Mrs Christina Wright, 73, was accustomed to watch the world from her window. She saw Alison come home that day. She gave an accurate description of what Alison had been wearing and told the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... eyes for a moment and say hello or goodbye’ – about Robert Graves in Majorca, and about an old lady singing: Forty-four and forty-five Am I dead or am 1 alive? I know but I don’t care. I know about despair. This intensely personal structure of image and reference ensures that Blackburn is always present in her book, but she is never assertive. St ...”

“... her introduction, ‘everything from bestiality to vibrators’. And, predictably, Erica Jong; and Lady Chatterley enjoying in Mellor’s iron bedstead ‘such a clean passion’; and Alexander Portnoy huddled behind a billboard, violating a piece of raw liver on his way to his barmitzvah lesson. On the evidence here, since women gained the freedom to write ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... extent to which female literature flooded the marketplace caused monthly magazines to become so ‘lady-like’ that the American novelist and psychiatrist Silas Weir Mitchell felt ‘that naturally they will soon menstruate.’ Unable to procreate themselves, male writers were thus compelled to construct what Showalter calls ‘a new myth of creativity in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Queen was the fixed point in a spinning world: everything going to the dogs but the great lady still smiling there with the corgis. It tells us a lot about Larkin, but it tells us even more about everyone’s need for a Great Goddess in some form or other. Quiet as the verse is it would be hard to imagine a more powerful advertisement for a royal ...”

“... terminological inexactitude. Perhaps in time the fun lexicon of friendly fibs will be augmented by Lady Archer’s phrase inaccurate préis, describing her husband’s gift for telling a flowery autobiographical tale. See ...”