“... over in the living-room. ‘Di’ herself was in the picture just the other night. Quite the lady once you get to know her... I also like what Reed says about the fickleness of crowds. It was so sweet to see the masses gather under the balcony of Buckingham Palace this summer, yelling for the ‘Queen Mum’. She hasn’t been in such direct personal ...”

“... wear a nightie, ducked her in the surf, threw away her wedding ring and worshipped her as ‘Our Lady of the Sands’. Linda herself claims to be descended from Joan of Arc, so – pace Bryan – you don’t really care when she sees UN number plates on Richard and Dan’s car, or CIA notepaper in their beach house. Nor do you think that Dan’s sojourn in a ...”

“... Russian roulette with mortar bombs. Neither man would lose face by moving first. Stuff the little lady and the stout civilian type, the boys had important business to attend to: their vanity. I’m sure that E. was jealous of Modesto’s reputation for bravery, of his commanding an army, not merely reporting this war. But why did Modesto let himself get ...”

“... occupation, itself over twenty years old. We drive to a freezing office in the city where a large lady in her forties is seated at a desk beside a one-bar fire. Her card reads ‘Artificial Limbs Manufacture, Cinema Street’. ‘What do you think of our intifada?’ she asks with evident pride. ‘You saw Bethlehem at Christmas? How was it?’ ‘Empty,’ I ...”

“... with them was enjoyable, if confusing sometimes. I thought of getting together with a little old lady in Worthing to write some sharp little stories she had in mind but it never came off. I did write a poem, called ‘Two Fingers’, with Judy Delaghty, about a young woman losing her virginity in a drunken and brutal way at a party, but there’s not much of ...”

“... The best of them is ‘The Girl from Zlot,’ a modern narrative that retains the metres of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ – ‘Four grey walls, and four grey towers’ – and catches some of Tennyson’s ...”

“... Felix found himself delivering a love-note from a student of his father’s to a sublimely naked lady who had probably served as the model for one of Holbein’s Madonnas; he himself, Ladurie notes, had a handsome nose of the Holbein persuasion, the sort that can become ‘the decisive argument’ of the painted face. Nor was it just the learning, the ...”

“... without occasionally feeling that Mrs Castle, and the nation, have been unlucky. There was another lady Cabinet Minister who was a wholly political animal, who worked like a Trojan, who fought her departmental corner like a tigress, and who was not above using carefully-calculated feminine histrionics to bounce an embarrassed Cabinet into conceding her more ...”

“... come to visit only the master of the house. This enables Sir John to forget to locate his wife. Is Lady Clerk allowed to occupy the central block with her husband? He will be rather lonely when guests are absent if she does not. Or is she squeezed into a side pavilion with maidservants and children? Above all, though, stands the upper-class belief that the ...”

“... was told to amend the piece; I was sent off with the reset galleys to find Sir Thomas. He and Lady Beecham were at a theatre, sitting in the stalls, with the curtain about to go up. Kneeling, I handed Sir Thomas the revised version and, as the lights went down, he read it. He did not speak, but he condescended to nod. Two emotions then assailed me. I was ...”

“... Hamilton (carried over from Emerson’s first novel, Second Sight), is a bright, young and pretty lady of letters. In the enjoyment of what is apparently the most enviable of modern lives, she is unexpectedly deserted by Martin, her Classics-don-at-London-University husband. A ‘black sea of despair’ engulfs Jennifer. She lies awake until three o’clock ...”

“... Themes of anti-braininess and anti-feminism run through this book, and every period it covers. Lady Oxford says firmly that, before the war, ‘you had to be clever to go into law, diplomacy, the Civil Service, or politics, and few of the aristocracy ever became stockbrokers. All this has changed, and big business has attracted many young men of birth and ...”

“... Nose. A bizarre coda was added when friends followed a ‘double’ to the apartment of a certain lady, but Solzhenitsyn was not amused: they had uncovered his secret liaison with Svetlova, the woman who became his second wife. Marriage to Svetlova seemed inevitable when she became pregnant. Radiation, had not, after all, destroyed the fertility of this ...”

“... saw the poor little broken Baroness away for good and so pathetic ... we were very glad we went. Lady Delamere was crying afterwards. Long before her ‘frightful trial’ with words began, Karen Blixen had endured so much pain, indignity and disappointment that by the age of 46, she had become impervious to the dictates of fate. The claim that ‘no one ...”

“... and precise political statement in a recipe, or to find the culinary counterparts to Guernica or Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, capable of earning their creators obloquy, exile or death. Marinetti’s fascist-surrealist manifesto, La Cucina Futurista, with its diatribe against unmanly pasta asciutta, was at once a singular exception and a total failure: pasta only ...”