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“... to crowd themselves into a chair, and demand to be carried for a shilling as far as an airy young lady whom we scarcely feel upon our poles. Surely we ought to be paid like all other mortals in proportion to our labour. Engines should be fixed in proper places to weigh chairs as they weigh wagons; and those whom ease and plenty have made unable to carry ...”

“... take the eye to the foreground of the image; they have more character than the young lady at the clavichord, or even the painter himself. In a self-portrait you notice the bright pages of the large, open folio on which his hand rests before you look at his face. The eye is unwilling to leave the still lifes. Given that, sometimes at least, they ...”

“... composed lives of Catullus by arranging in a conjectural order the love-poems mentioning the lady whom he called Lesbia, and confidently told the public what roles were played in the life of Horace by Cinara, Lydia and Chloe. When the futility of this became apparent, scholars reacted by assuring the reader whenever a poet mentioned a ...”

“... too,’ he says, shoving his face into hers and taking a handful of eyeliners. Suddenly the little lady erupts. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘I’m a policewoman,’ and she brandishes her identification in his face as they do in police series. ‘You’re nicked.’ She isn’t exactly an intimidating figure and he’s practically out of the shop now anyway but ...”

“... on that day, she sometimes recited a mysterious poem called ‘Lasca’ about a spirited young lady in Texas who ‘sighed for a canter after the cattle’. A crack of the whip like a shot in a battle With the green below and the blue above And dash and danger and life and love. The spirited young lady came from East ...”

“... this is what can happen to great houses with ambiguous legacies.The copper beech tree on which Lady Gregory’s guests carved their names is close by. You can just make out some of the initials: GBS, SOC, WBY, JBY, AE. ‘All/That comes of the best knit to the best,’ Yeats wrote in ‘Upon a House Shaken by Land Agitation’. ...”

“... vile.’ More confident women have their expectations disappointed – like the liberal-minded old lady who allows hippies to swim in her lake and, as a result, returns from her morning swim naked and disconsolate, after an unfortunate experience. ‘Christ, Mother!’ says her son, throwing her a tablecloth. Her daughter-in-law ‘responds to the story’ in ...”

“... He seems to me to uplift, to be in a comic sense ‘too good for this life’, like the desecrated lady on the poster advertisement for Sunny Prestatyn. Even his fear of death can calm and satisfy ours. (After ‘Aubade’, he had a letter from a lady of 72 ‘saying she felt as I did once but now doesn’t mind’.) But, as ...”

“... are shits, but that I really hate left-wing people. I fell in love with Nell Dunn, whose mother. Lady Mary Campbell ... lived in the Ritz ... Nell was wearing jeans, a Peace For Me top under an Afghan waistcoat, her fine blonde hair tied up with luminous beads. I was carrying her Moroccan-carpet shoulderbag stocked with leaflets advertising a poetry-and-jazz ...”

“... spite on the part of the Muse to persuade Ms Benkovitz that, if someone has the name and title Lady Henrietta Pelham, you can save time when she is next mentioned by calling her Lady Pelham. To students of Firbank Ms Benkovitz has managed to make herself, despite everything, indispensable: by buying several of his ...”

“... stand, leaving them lumbered with such dreadful and socially damaging errors as the assertion that Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a great work of literature and a helpful guide to sex-life. There have been too many such mistakes, and a guess, now, is that embarrassment is a response that should be received respectfully – if not Nature’s Guide to Bad ...”

“... ignored the warning chorus of Schonfields, Shankses and Croslands. BSA profits supported Lady Docker. ‘British Achievements Speak for Britain,’ said the hoardings, with pictures of Shipbuilding, Steel, Nuclear Power, Cars, Aircraft and everything else that was soon to go so wrong, so disastrously. Together we walked backwards into decline. Who ...”

“... and accepted self, the inherited and environmentally-conditioned personality of a ‘great lady’ on the eastern seaboard of America, destined to follow her mother in being a gracious hostess, golfer, lady bountiful, social arbiter, benefactor of hospitals and causes. She seems to have had the right self for the ...”

“... made John Jasper more in love with Edwin than he is with Rosa. I also much enjoyed the essay on Lady Morgan, known as ‘Glorvina’ and author of The Wild Irish Girl (the title is ironic – the girl was an animated and cultivated bluestocking), and its guess that Jane Austen, who thought poorly of the novel, may have had Glorvina in mind when she created ...”