“... in England, that Renaissance backwater, men and women – Robert Wakefield, William Tyndale and Lady Jane Grey – made the effort; and the man whose trail-blazing translation of the New Testament from its original Greek had paved the way for the Reformation ought logically to have done the same with me Old Testament. But Erasmus had a good Catholic’s ...”

“... like of this old house – it will tumble about our ears I reckon, one day or another, and yet my lady is always repairing it.’ The inheritance and running of the Hall are disputed by corrupt clergy, tricky lawyers, upper and lower servants representing capitalist and lower-class interests, and a gang of criminals hiding in the cellars. Smith’s plot ...”

“... what they were not like. In page after page Edith Thompson examined the personalities of Lady Sarah Ides, Cesare Carelli or the Princess Mancelli with the ferocious attention of a Dallas fan. ‘About Dolores darlint – I dont agree with you at all about her not liking her husband’; ‘I didnt like Theo myself’; ‘I like Clarie – she is so ...”

“... the National Trust. I was apprehensive of what I might find inside. Diary of an Edwardian Country Lady beer mats? A glass cover over the ‘genuine’ sawdust sweepings? But conversation in the massively intimate snugs was anything but hushed, and the punters (lurkers and late-risers every one) standing around in the polychromatic magnificence of the tiled ...”

“... it. (As if I could!) The comic element is of course recognised. Toynbee was delighted to hear a lady interviewed on TV say: ‘You’ve got to believe in something. And I believe in the non-animal fat diet.’ Insatiably religious persons who have caught the virus late in life have something in common, but may differ strongly in ...”

“... off Boofy’s large pet badger, which would ‘snuffle round our knees in the drawing-room while Lady Arran served us tea’. Arran was responsible for the Badger Protection Act but his ardour cooled somewhat after his wife was attacked and almost killed by a group of badgers on a Scottish island. Arran announced in his newspaper column that he had decided ...”

“... actors in Restoration plays rushed round crying ‘A pox on’t’ not ‘A gout on’t’ (though Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote: ‘People wish their enemies dead – but I do not; I say give them the gout. Give them the stone!’). The last really gouty hero of literature, we are told, was Smollett’s Squire Bramble, with all that ‘ludic ...”

“... reader of the tale is, at a certain point, turned against him. We side fervently with the old lady, holding out against this ‘publishing scoundrel’. Likewise, in the course of Sir Vidia’s Shadow, which is meant to make us see Naipaul as a monster, we find ourselves asking what kind of a monster wrote it. The book starts in Uganda, with a chapter ...”

“... or Eliot (‘Tiresias’). Duffy’s Mrs Lazarus, an altogether gentler creature than Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’, muses on her husband’s death and her all too brief new life: The last hair on his head floated out from a book. His scent went from the house. The will was read. See, he was vanishing to the small zero held by the gold of my ring. Beckett’s ...”

“... friends                and one woman                who is the Lady                of wherever we                may go. The evident shift in pronoun (what I now mean by ‘we’) is a clear question about place. These lines in ‘A Gold Ring Called Reluctance’ (from the 1968 collection ...”

“... considerably longer. In Sparta, North Carolina, high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, lives a young lady called Charlotte Simmons, an academic prodigy and a paragon of God-fearing, hard-working, down-home virtue besides. Much to the admiration of her family and her ‘gruff’, ‘dear’ mentor Miss Pennington, she wins a scholarship to Dupont University, an ...”

“... the surgeon’s knife with the stoic observation that his days as a ‘beau’ were over anyway; Lady de Lancey hunting down her missing husband on the battlefield and cradling his dying body in her arms. The fact that so many wives accompanied their officer husbands to the war zone – Thackeray described Waterloo as not so much a battlefield as a ...”

“... lithium batteries for Marlboro cigarettes, a bottle of foreign wine for a bicycle, a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the second volume of the erotic classic, Jin Ping Mei.’ Just before she dies, through the blood on her face, Su Yun sees one of her lovers sitting among the horrified audience, which gives her great satisfaction. On cue, the writer ...”

“... parents), decided they should move there. Another recent arrival on the block, a racist old lady called Isabel Vendle, plans to transform the neighbourhood into the ‘new paradise’ of ‘Boerum Hill’. The novel’s opening sentence – ‘Like a match struck in a darkened room’ – describes her delighted reaction to seeing two white girls ...”

“... the strait is named after his ships, he never made it through. Leopold McClintock, despatched by Lady Franklin to search for her husband on King William Island, tried six times to penetrate Bellot Strait during the summer of 1858 before continuing his journey by dog-sled. It took Roald Amundsen three years – including two winters lodged in the ice – to ...”