“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of bumbling golfers, based on characters first brought to the screen by Alfred Hitchcock in The Lady Vanishes (1938). This segment divides critics: the sight of two men competing for a trophy wife now seems tedious and distasteful (even in 1945 US distributors filleted it out, doing little harm to the overarching story). But just when Dead of Night seems ...”

“... museum directors. Recent acquisitions range from Sir Godfrey Kneller’s extraordinary portrait of Lady Mary Boyle and her son Charles (1690) – believed to be the earliest British depiction of a mother breastfeeding her child – to Cecily Brown’s The Hound with the Horses’ Hooves (2019), an enormous abstract painting which depicts, from a lowered ...”

“... manuscript fragment is of the unfinished novel Sanditon. Another substantial fragment is the early Lady Susan, and a third is The Watsons, also abandoned in manuscript. In addition to line-by-line transcriptions which add to the bulk of the book and may not be much consulted, except by future editors (if one can imagine the need for them), there are some ...”

“... visitor to the park, now a ghost of her former self. The ‘heightened reality of the “Iron Lady”, scourge of the trade unions, victor of the Falklands War, the best man in the cabinet’ has dissipated. She totters through the park, steadied by an agency nurse, wearing ‘old ladies’ clothes’ and ‘flat suede lace-up shoes of the kind you see ...”

“... me’). There is even a woman who shuts up a child with the thought that she’ll end up like that lady, working behind a checkout, if she doesn’t try harder at school. Sam evokes her solitude and powerlessness when faced with difficult customers. She describes moments of drifting off into a kind of computer-game reverie, suspended somewhere above the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... campaign of 1964, journalists agreed that the prototypical right-wing activist was a little old lady in tennis shoes from Orange County, California. A lot of those little old ladies are dead now, their daughters and younger sisters less avid in the cause, and, today, once-WASP Orange County is full of poor Vietnamese refugees doing piecework in local ...”