“... girl falls for a creepy borderline paedophile. A disabled woman forces the arms of a dead old lady she has never met into silk funeral clothes, hears a crack, thinks she has probably broken one. Sansan, an ageing English teacher, ‘Miss Casablanca’ (because, romantically inclined, she teaches the film time after time), the daughter of a woman who sells ...”

“... in Alabama schools. Six million poor children got health insurance when Hillary was first lady. She persuaded George W. Bush to give New York $20 billion after 9/11 and took care of the first responders’ respiratory problems. Her tenure as secretary of state was reduced to an overnight trip to Israel from South-East Asia to wrangle a ceasefire after ...”

“... British Isles. She eventually ran her quarry to earth in a cottage in North Yorkshire, home of a lady born to the not very Gallic surname of Parry-Jones, who had a treasured cache of family documents in a trunk that had come to rest there after a sojourn in Chile. Another great dossier of papers was discovered in a château in Périgord. Now, after ...”

“... A section on women, birds and feathers moves from Cecil Beaton’s designs for My Fair Lady, to Simone de Beauvoir’s novel L’Invitée, to Hitchcock’s The Birds, to Rubens and Correggio’s paintings of Leda and the swan, to Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter collection of 2001, to Wuthering Heights (I’ll stop there). In ‘Pockets, Purses ...”

“... that words in the age of the internet never disappear – but a straight-backed, firm-gripped iron lady, secure in her Securonomics, ‘iron-clad’. People I met really liked the Reeves speech, especially the bit about taxing the non-doms and the energy profiteers. But the truth is that I didn’t actually see it except on YouTube, because Labour wouldn’t ...”

“... of her front teeth fell out into the snow in front of a firehouse. A fireman came out and said, “Lady can I help you?” “Oh, my pearl,” she said. “I dropped my pearl.”’Throughout her brief, blazing career, Darling worked hard to appear superficial. Her topics of conversation were lipstick, hair, clothes, stockings, stars, men: light, breezy salon ...”

“... in the US in 1969, it was panned by Hugh Kenner in the New York Times as the work of a ‘lady novelist’. A few days later, at the age of 41, she walked into the sea in the Hamptons. Sontag identified the body.The fiction was out of print for decades, but in recent years there has been a revival of interest in Taubes. Divorcing was reissued by New ...”

“... collected here. Reworking a solemn pronouncement of T.S. Eliot’s from ‘Ash Wednesday’ (‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree’), she writes: ‘Baby, 3 black/Panthers soiling the plantain leaves at the noon of day’. Hip phrases seep into Lang’s verse, and her arcane symbols, such as the White Crow, verge on parody: ‘I waited ...”

“... daughters, feared for their internal organs. ‘She used to tell us a dreadful moral tale about a lady who laced herself so hard that she cut her liver right in half.’Structural transformations of the figure weren’t limited to the upper half of the body. In the early 18th century there was a vogue for gigantic skirts, which had to be supported by ...”

“... at great risk. Individual pieces are made to stand in for an entire culture. How representative is Lady Anne Drury’s inventive closet, painted with sprightly emblems and botanical motifs in the early 17th century? The decorated panelling was moved between different residences and then, on the destruction of Hardwick House in the 1920s, to an Ipswich ...”

“... the pattern, for the greediest wanting and getting was for her also a form of frenzied bestowal. Lady Bountiful is by tradition a predatory and demanding figure, evaded by the victims of her benevolence. And as Rosemary Sullivan remarks in this readable and informative study, Elizabeth and her younger sister ‘acted out a fantasy of social ...”

“... and Belgium in particular. La Salette, where, in 1846, three shepherd children saw a ‘beautiful lady’, provided a closer comparison to Marpingen. One of the little-noticed effects of cultural globalisation is that Mary, like Marilyn Monroe or Mickey Mouse or the Lone Ranger, has come to dominate the cable networks of the imagination. Local saints with ...”

“... more wounding nonsenses. She cannot let Mitford get away with imputing ‘intense cowardice’ to Lady Derby for not trying to strangle a crazed footman who murdered her butler and under-butter; seemingly, she was in no state to strangle anybody since, as the first to be attacked, she was already lying in a pool of blood. Other nonsenses are not worth ...”

“... smart in his new tie from Fraternity Row, over in Mississippi. But there are bad omens – the lady in the mink stole, the kind that had the heads left on it, the eyes ‘small, black, vicious beads that glared at him in outrage’, and the change in the Louisiana weather, ‘turning the crisp November air into a rank soup that smelled of hearty ...”

“... he took up residence in Moscow exactly a month before Pravda’s denunciation of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth, which at last made plain to musicians how little their future well-being was going to depend on their ability to compose what Prokofiev had understood as ‘music that would correspond both in form and content to the grandeur of the epoch’ – the ...”