“... 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 ...”

“... such cravings, and wrote ruefully about ‘the prestige which money gives’. Writing as ‘Our Lady Correspondent’ for the Daily Alta California, a San Francisco paper, she wonders why ‘writers, especially female writers, make their heroines so indifferent to good eating, so careless about taking cold, and so impervious to all the creature ...”

“... Thus he always needed a girl, and she didn’t have to be famous. First he’d go for his leading lady. If she wasn’t free, he’d try some famous ex, like Lana Turner, whom he’d dated in the 1940s, for old times. Then he’d work his way down the food chain, starting with starlets, then the hookers, and, if all else failed, he’d call Peggy Lee, who ...”

“... some of which had been acquired decades earlier and were never intended to be seen. In 1938, Lady Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, marchioness of Londonderry, caused a stir when she appeared at a fashion show with a dragon tattoo, which she’d had done in Japan in 1904, visible through her sheer stockings.By this time, the tattoo artist’s job had been made ...”

“... of peace, kitted out with gardens, vegetable plots, craft centres and all unsullied by men. ‘A Lady of Letters’ ends in a women’s prison, with Miss Ruddock saying: ‘I’m so … happy.’ In ‘Nights in the Gardens of Spain’ two characters find love in a prison garden. Now at the end of Allelujah! (and slightly to my surprise) there comes another ...”

“... thanking her for what he terms her amazing insights into Moby-Dick. He then remarks; ‘My dear Lady, I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I commend will be a rural bowl of milk.’ Clearly, ‘a rural bowl of milk’ is expected to suit the tastes of the general public, though it may be significant that in the novel Pierre’s ...”

“... an effigy of Dundas was carried into George Square and set alight outside the house of his mother, Lady Arniston. Despite the intervention of troops, who were strongly resisted by the crowd, windows were broken in her house and in that of Robert Dundas, the lord advocate and Henry’s nephew. One rioter was shot by the soldiers, several injured. The crowd ...”

“... cheap hotels and climactically the shells of aphrodisiac oysters, are not going to do for a social lady – or rather, to see it another way, are too likely to do for a social lady. And the ‘overwhelming question’ leads to the wrong kind of altar. Just as America and Europe seem here to intertwine topographically, so the ...”

“... had invaded his privacy, not he theirs. His subsequent films, Rebecca, Pride and Prejudice and Lady Hamilton, show him muffling his sexuality in withdrawn diffidence, with that effect of coquetry which led some contemporaries to describe him as flirtatious. But knowledge of his power is clearly present in the scenes where he woos Katherine of France in ...”

“... succession (The Big Sleep in 1939, Farewell, My Lovely in 1940, The High Window in 1942 and The Lady in the Lake in 1943), there was a gap of six years before The Little Sister appeared in 1949, reflecting Chandler’s other career as a screenwriter (he wrote The Blue Dahlia and shared credit for the adaptations of Strangers on a Train and Double ...”