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“... suddenly the man burst into flames ... The table rose from the floor before my very eyes ... The lady went into a trance and found herself reliving her earlier life as a servant to the King of France ... The spoon bent without the boy so much as touching it ...’ etc. Next comes the liberal-minded physicist who on the face of it appears quite willing to ...”

“... is concerned is shown by novels as different as Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Portrait of a Lady. The ‘puzzle’ in the former concerns, for Sutherland, the question of whether Alec D’Urberville is to be regarded technically as a rapist. Was Tess raped, or was she seduced? Sutherland, taking this as an important legal question, inclines to the view ...”

“... Russell. There is a couple who lived for a year in a cave in Central Park; Jane Barnell, a lady with a beard 13½ inches long; the nine-year-old child prodigy Philippa Duke Schuyler, who reads Plutarch, plays poker, and has composed more than sixty pieces for the piano; and Commodore Dutch, ‘a brassy little man who has made a living for the last ...”

“... on skipping, When with his royal shipping The narrow seas are shady, And Charles brings home the lady. ‘Sure up’/‘Europe’ is a hiccuping drunken rhyme so bad as to acknowledge that the reality is likely to be harder to achieve than it sounds. Jonson is careful to separate slightly events in the Palatinate from those in Spain: skipping (prompted no ...”

“... The Female Detective, a collection of stories, came soon afterwards in 1864, and Revelations of a Lady Detective the same year; all were serialised. The Notting Hill Mystery is presented as a dossier of evidence collected by an insurance agent, Ralph Henderson, investigating the mysterious death of a woman whose husband had taken out five life insurance ...”

“... no man can work.’ Good works in this general sense could be performed by an invalid Evangelical lady, flat on her back but radiating piety. There has, however, been a strong tendency in the Evangelical tradition to conflate good works with labour. A famous instance is found in Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs of 1720, written prior to the Evangelical Movement ...”

“... intrusions of human presence in swathed columns of drapery and colour. In the stunning picture of Lady Meux – born Susan Langdon, the mistress of a corporal in the Life Guards before she married a brewing heir – with black ground, black gown, black gloves, white furs, Lady Meux is more of a tidy little mannequin than a ...”

“... victims enjoying rape or being humiliated in court. Jestbook assumptions are central to works like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Virtue in Danger’, a sarcastic ballad on a real-life society case of 1721, and to the startling premise of Eliza Haywood’s novel of 1727, The Lucky Rape. Decades later more decorous women writers were still using the basic ...”

“... just out of reach. Over house-roofs: sullen hills, the firth drained down to sandbanks: the Reckit Lady, the Shair as Daith. I lay to sleep, with by my side neither man nor child; but a lichened branch that wound through the wooden chamber, pulling it close. It seemed a complicity like our own, when arm in arm on the city street, we bemoan our families, our ...”

“... of Victorian stage-Irishness as a literary mode, but also their glorified replacement, once Yeats, Lady Gregory and the rest of them got going on the campaign to add dignity to Ireland. ‘The looking-glass, cracked, does not tell the truth’ – and the resulting distortions are, in a sense, John Wilson Foster’s subject in his impressive new scrutiny of ...”

“... dowagers present said something more than usually fatuous’. The dowagers are identified as Lady Lee of Fareham and Lady Robertson. The former ‘comes from Maine and looks like the matron of a cottage-hospital’. The latter ‘comes from Virginia and looks like a peach-fed ham’. Given this gratuitous abuse of the ...”

“... the mother, Lucia (Silvana Mangano), at home looking just as bored and lonely as a bourgeois lady is supposed to, and the maid, Emilia (Laura Betti), taking care of a few chores. All this in black and white, as if to remind us what Neorealism used to look like before Fellini got hold of it. A postman fluttering his arms like an angel’s wings – just ...”

“... farmworkers, the tramps, the goat-breeding dropouts, the tree-saving professor, the rich old lady and her maid, the small-time crooks – than we do about Mona, since they are still around and talking, if only in cameos. The question the film asks and won’t (can’t) answer is what Mona wants. It’s as if she is revising 1960s hippiedom by excluding ...”

“... Murders in the Rue Morgue’, in which an escaped orangutan turns out to have decapitated an old lady and shoved her daughter up a chimney – but it was the first directly to address the phenomenon that became known as phone hacking. A message has been intercepted. Its contents, if disclosed, would do great damage to an illustrious person. The police know ...”

“... being the creepy personification of those consequences, a naked woman dripping blood, an old lady in a nightdress, a naked man on a roof. Is everyone followed by such figures? No, but the girl at the beginning was, and the figure did more than follow her. There are times when you might think you were watching an Enid Blyton story worked over for the ...”