“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... too often forgotten, one might ask for a biography of King Alfred’s daughter Æthelflæd, ‘Lady of the Mercians’, who in partnership with her brother Edward ‘the Elder’ and her extremely mysterious husband, ‘Alderman’ Æthelræd, played the Isabella role in the tenth-century reconquista of central England from the pagan Vikings, and left her ...”

“... she warns, ‘make the mistake of reading the Savoy Dames straight.’ With the exception of Lady Blanche in Princess Ida, ‘the large contralto characters’ are ‘not the misogynistic figure itself, but a parody of that figure’. Gilbert isn’t mocking plain, middle-aged women. He’s mocking people who mock such women, because such women are not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... scene-setting, but with direct speech: ‘“I tell you this will never do George,” said the old lady to her son.’ Part One ends on a note of suspense likely to make readers eager for the next issue. Hogg the short-story writer and Hogg the editor learned their crafts together; the Spy’s hodgepodge of genres and voices is springily productive. As he ...”

“... 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 ...”