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“... the matter up again, when it was all so definitively done and dusted by our very English Iron Lady, who to make things all the more poignant (or aggravating) is now just a shadow of her former self. So too is the British Empire, which persists, against all the evidence, in reimagining itself ruling the waves and capable of decently governing even its ...”

“... Leverhulme called the Neoclassical gallery he built to house his extensive collections the Lady Lever Art Gallery in memory of his wife. It stands among Port Sunlight’s English-vernacular terraces like a grande dame at a village fête. What it contains, however, is a reminder of a time when popular taste and the taste of a rich collector could have ...”

“... mutual appreciation was a trade-off, in which the obsessed artist got a taste of grace and the lady fraternised with immortality. That she knew he was immortal was an indispensable part of the deal: a useful conjunction of high art and high living has always depended on the second respecting the first as much as the first the second. Another case in point ...”

“... the Ladies: perfumed, decorative and sumptuously furnished; in the middle, Mamouse, the large lady caretaker who sits ‘like the dog Cerberus’ at the gates of hell, watching over her pourboires and her pot of simmering chicken-giblet broth. Prickly’s chief aim in life is to sneak past Mamouse into the Ladies, where behind closed doors, and without ...”

“... frið sem álfkona, ‘fair as an elf-woman’, and Anglo-Saxons said ides ælfscinu, ‘elf-fair lady’. But they are dangerous too. Elves are ‘cruel for fun’, Granny Weatherwax says in Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies (1992) – another hardline view, denied by some (Tolkien), maintained by others (Keats). They were thought to be wise, even ...”

“... a reputation for life: ‘Mazie’, about a woman who sold tickets in a skidrow movie theatre; ‘Lady Olga’, about the sideshow life of a bearded woman; and ‘The Old House at Home’, about a neighbourhood tavern that had been selling ale mainly to elderly gents with Irish names since 1854. Mitchell wrote a lot of other great stories, too – ‘fact ...”

“... and favoured a mewing private language: ‘I began a big pastermiece – a dragon, and a lady in a birthday-suit – for which Dod is going to sit.’ They dressed up as butterflies and bacchantes, and squeaked about sex over cocoa and boiled eggs; Mrs Colenbrander tells us that when Harold and Laura Knight arrived: ‘Their brilliant painting ...”

“... affluent, it is essential to the film that they are middle class, unlike the aristocratic Lady Beldon. Her granddaughter, Carol, becomes engaged to the Minivers’ elder son, Vin, before he leaves to fight with the RAF. After toying with various endings, MGM killed off Carol in an air raid, leaving Vin and ...”

“... the Berkeley in Piccadilly even allowed unchaperoned female diners. In 1899, a piece in the Lady claimed that thirty years earlier women had almost never dined in public. Only one or two respectable establishments had allowed female customers, and women were expected to be accompanied by their husbands. Now, the writer for the ...”

“... wax hardened around them, needed to throw stones at the Irish Literary Revival, led by Yeats and Lady Gregory. ‘The “Irish” Literary Theatre,’ Pearse wrote in 1899,is, in my opinion, more dangerous, because less glaringly anti-national than Trinity College. If we once admit the Irish literature is English idea, then the language movement is a ...”

“... insanity.’ One has to agree: sanity is a long way off as White signs on to become a cleaning lady at her favourite church, gets her flat exorcised, believes a black beetle is the incarnation of Our Lady, and becomes convinced that the Indian mystic Meher Baba is ‘telling’ her to do things: like give up smoking for ...”

“... Marbot Bt, the only Roman Catholic among the titled gentry of Northumberland. Andrew’s mother, Lady Catherine, born in 1781 in Dresden, was the daughter of Lord Claverton, who had retired to Redmond Manor (now the property of an Arab magnate), some seventy miles from Marbot Hall, after a lifetime spent in the diplomatic service in Germany, the Low ...”

“... did not prevent Tenducci, when he arrived in London, from receiving love letters in 1759 from Lady Lyttelton, whose husband wrote to his brother: ‘She has again made herself the talk of the Town by writing Love letters to Signor Tanduchi [sic] a Eunuch, one of which has been shown to several people.’ Dorothea Maunsell fell in love with Tenducci when ...”

“... Line Saga’, ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’; ‘Lust’ at ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ and ‘On a Night like This’; ‘Justice’ at ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, ‘Seven Curses’ and ‘Oxford Town’. Ricks aims to demonstrate how the songs under consideration in the first half of his book engage with but avoid the ...”

“... still raise a smile. The vain but short-statured Garrick was a perennial target. Asked by a lady if the puppets in his new show were life-size, Foote replied: ‘No Madam, they are just a little bigger than Garrick.’ And of the actor’s somewhat mannered tragic style: ‘Garrick was a man born’ – long pause – ‘never to finish a ...”