“... 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 ...”

“... a fountain – this in the presence of Robbie Turner, the son of the family’s faithful cleaning lady, who has also been sent, at the expense of the girls’ father, to Cambridge. Robbie did well there, but has now decided to start again and qualify as a doctor – one who ‘would be alive to the monstrous patterns of fate, and to the vain and comic denial ...”

“... for work, arrives on foot at a grand house near Edinburgh, where she hopes to be taken on as a lady’s maid by Arabella, the smart English mistress of the estate. Here a clever thing happens. Ara-bella is about to dismiss Bessy as a potential servant – she has lied about her knowledge of farming – when a chance comment changes her mind. Bessy asks for ...”

“... emphasis on the phrase ‘what is done is done,’ and, at three in the morning, all I can hear is Lady Macbeth saying this line after the murder of Duncan, to which her husband replies: ‘We have scorched the snake, not killed it.’ Besides, what does he mean? Who did the thing that has been done? It seems a very active and particular word for the more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”