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“... Sister Dew, good-hearted parish helper, is the equivalent of Mrs Jennings or Miss Bates. The mean Lady (Muriel) Selvedge, who comes to open the Church bazaar and lunches en route near Victoria for 3s 9d, might be based on the entrepreneurial Lady Denham in Sanditon. Ianthe’s aunt, Bertha, married to the rector of a ...”

“... disapproval, the boy threw himself into the school plays at Clifton, excelling in female parts. As Lady Mary Lasenby in J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, the 15-year-old Michael wept plausible womanly tears. As the social-climbing Mrs Hardcastle in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer he proved he could do comedy. But it was his ...”

“... Mitford had not had the luxury of a school education, her parents – Lord and Lady Redesdale – not thinking it worth the trouble and expense for girls. But she shared most of Romilly’s enthusiasms and hatreds. In particular, unlike her sisters Diana and Unity, who were busy falling in love with both Fascism and Fascists (Oswald Mosley ...”

“... blind, deaf etc. Fish rejoices at the point in Comus (actually a later textual addition) where the Lady, after a long passage of robust reasoning on behalf of virtue, tells the threatening wood-demon that she will argue with him no longer. For Fish’s Milton the important thing is never to assess the argument proffered but always to identify the party to ...”

“... as if he had not altered his position, but he thought it better not to worry the kind old lady; so he smiled gently when she broke bits of toasted bread into the broth with all the bustle befitting so solemn a preparation.’What matters most, in the larger scheme of things, is that Oliver should have recovered a memory of the mother he barely ...”

“... Imminent Global Sapphic Takeover, that is. Aggressive, competitive, exorbitantly heterosexual Poet Lady with long flowing hair. Thirty years later, one of the Reigning Poetry Divas of Our Time. Poet Lady [in great excitement, to the group]: Hey, guys, you’ll never believe the weird gossip I just heard! [Everyone smiles and ...”

“... himself to beggary. Nearly at death’s door, he was carried into the kitchen of a charitable lady who took pity on the unfortunate. Ay-ya! The lady was none other than his wife! Ashamed, Zhang tried to hide in the fireplace, and was burned to ashes. But when he reached the other world, the Jade Emperor rewarded ...”

“... of marriage’ and exerting a ‘powerful influence for evil’. It is also improbable that a lady veteran of show-business today would find herself so surprised by pregnancy or that she would accept the condition with such passive resignation. Then again in 1948 Italy seemed like the moon – a place not easily reached from LA. Ingrid Bergman did ...”

“... this time our life was hanging by a thread’; ‘I felt drawn as if by a magnet to the young lady at my side.’ But the narrative is pretty continuously absorbing for what it tells us about everyday life in Hitler’s Germany and, in particular, about the predicament, the reactions and the motivation of the doomed Jewish community. The value of the book ...”

“... to transfer some money to Canada. It’s about $100. Nothing big.’ ‘Sure. Please talk to the lady behind that desk. She’ll help you.’ ‘Good morning. The lady over there told me you could help me with a wire transfer to Canada. It’s just about $100.’ The woman looks amused. ‘First of all, if you want us ...”

“... with vignettes that run from The French Lieutenant’s Woman to The Devil Wore Prada to The Iron Lady. ‘You have to work doubly hard to make contemporary clothes disappear,’ another designer says, while Marit Allen, who worked on Brokeback Mountain, underlines the ‘subliminal telegraphy’ that clothes give out, adding the mysterious information that ...”

“... a match as if trying to set it on fire. In Charon’s boat I intend to give my seat to the first lady that comes along. Short poem: be brief and tell us everything. An old man huddled over a urinal with a doomsday sign on his back. The waiter’s name was Bartleby – or it should have been. He brought me two pieces of burnt toast on a cracked plate. I ...”

“... impasses – on ‘not getting it’ – in which she reproduces her college notes on ‘The Day Lady Died’, Frank O’Hara’s I-do-this-I-do-that poem. She laid bare the earnestness of the A-student – in primly rounded handwriting – with her crypto New Critical fatuities, noting, for example, the ‘lack of emotion in urban surroundings’. ‘For it ...”

“... he had to conduct conversations with – or rather deliver verbal messages to – her through a lady-in-waiting even though the duchess was seated only a few feet away. It may be true that the Emperor is supposed to have picked up a brush which Titian had dropped, but some distance must have been normal when the sitter was of high rank. Nor was a sitting ...”

“... with his ‘asinine high-pitched Bloomsbury voice’. One after another the nobs are scarified: Lady Diana Cooper, around whom ‘men of all ages flocked ... like gulls round a council tip,’ and who herself had ‘a talent for scavenging that would have done credit to a coyote’, Lady Mosley, Daphne Rae, Beatrice ...”