“... a question on the Princesse de Clèves. I don’t know if you’ve often had cause to ask the lady at the inquiry desk’ – the guichetière – ‘what she thought of the Princesse de Clèves. Imaginez un peu le spéctacle.’ The remark went unnoticed at the time, but Sarkozy repeated it word for word in an ‘interview’ he gave to a freesheet in ...”

“... her father) and would be a coup de théâtre today. She discovered that Sarah Siddons had seen Lady Macbeth not as a bloodthirsty harridan but as ‘feminine … even fragile’, but that she hadn’t played her that way; Terry decided to do so, and thus premiered what became one of the prevailing late 20th-century readings of the role. Her voluminous ...”

“... need eyes to see the page and hands to turn it. Some lick their thumbs; others, like Sheridan’s Lady Slattern, ‘cherish their nails for the convenience of making marginal notes’. Some leave distracting, even disgusting residues. Andrew Lang wrote in 1905 about reading Ann Radcliffe: The thick double-columned volume in which I peruse the works ...”

“... pages with something. So Beauman gives a thorough report of the time when Taylor, almost an old lady, invited two friends to luncheon in 1969 and they came on the wrong day: Herman declared Elizabeth had got it wrong and then sent what must have been a forged carbon copy of his original acceptance card ‘proving’ they had been due a day later. But ...”

“... Surprisingly little has been written recently about birdwatching. For Mynott, the image of the old lady paying her sub to the RSPB, hanging out fat balls and talking to the robin in her back garden can’t do the subject justice. His book is dense with evidence of the penetration of birds into our lives and vice versa. It is interested in American sports team ...”

“... who had cooled to her books said they felt guilty putting her down: she was just such a good lady. The best thing about Spurling’s focus is that it allows her to glide over most of Buck’s books – about India, Russia, Germany, Korea, American sculptresses who can’t decide between perfection of the life or the work, mountaineers who find that ...”

“... scruple, the sheer vindictiveness of Amis’s grammatical sneer at his own character Doll – ‘Lady Luck, that day, smiled on we Pretorians’ – even though that again seems typical of the miniature, interstitial, finally inconsequential scale of the imagination on display. The book as a whole strikingly lacks the dimension of fear: it is far too breezy ...”

“... I shall call​ my memoirs ‘Fifty Years a Bag Lady’. That is what papyrologists do: they pick over the written rubbish of antiquity for items of interest. You can learn a lot about your neighbours from their dustbins, and the dustbins of the ancient Greeks bring out all my curiosities. What did the Greeks do about garlic breath? What names did they give their cows? Why did they prefer Euripides to Sophocles? Why did they throw away so many copies of Homer? The last question invites a reflective answer ...”

“... sensationalising of Gothic narrative, for she needed to preserve her standing as a decorous lady. Coleridge, whose poetry often has powerfully Gothic overtones, was equally disapproving – particularly when the second edition of The Monk identified Lewis as an MP. Observing that ‘the Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or ...”

“... family of Nazareth, cloud of most pleasant rain, and sweetest fountain of nobleness and virtue, lady and heir of the perpetual happiness and glory of the noble realm of England (whom all sorts seek unto and submit themselves). To Elizabeth I and her advisers, ruling over a small island on the edge of Western Europe, and attempting to make a fragile ...”

“... Lent.In 1566, Antwerp’s fragile religious accord cracked. Protestants attacked the Church of Our Lady, and within the hour, every church and monastery in the city was besieged by image-breakers. The mapmaker Abraham Ortelius, whose business depended on Antwerp’s cosmopolitanism, mourned that ‘the churches looked as though the devil had been at work there ...”

“... Spanish flu in her journal, slipping it in as a joke between Lytton Strachey’s sore finger and Lady Murray’s invitation to lunch, when the death rate in parts of London was higher than it had been in the trenches and people who had been well at breakfast were dead by bedtime and deadly as plutonium to everyone who saw them in between, but I think I ...”

“... sense of this connection, but perhaps sense isn’t what she needs. It’s worth noting that the lady who told the original story comes to think that accepting that ‘contradictory ideas’ can both be true is a sign of ‘starting to grow up’.Mr Wilder and Me brings these perspectives together in interesting ways. The frame story is told by Calista, a ...”

“... children, is a map copied by one of the royal infants from the jigsaws used by their governess, Lady Charlotte Finch, to teach them geography. It indicates, with affecting but spurious precision, the territorial boundaries of the 12 tribes of Israel, in what the children, like almost everyone else in the 18th and 19th centuries, called the Holy Land. When ...”

“... little attention in Handley’s account. And they read: aloud or silently, by moon or candlelight. Lady Anne Clifford had devout material read to her in bed by her servants, who noted down ‘things new and old, Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors’ on small pieces of paper which were then pinned around her bedstead ...”