“... courts and rooms: only beneath the awe-inspiring gateway of Thornton Abbey does a sheepish lady in a red hat smile at the photographer. This landscape is unreal even for today. Where are the motorcars, the lawn-mowers, the ice-cream vans, the Saturday afternoon bikers, the bored children, the ignorant tourists, and our inattentive selves? Urban Britain ...”

“... is a good paper, David Astor ‘has flair. It’s not all done by luck’; ancient scandal – a lady-in-waiting of Queen Victoria thought to have been pregnant and a virgin; and best of all, Church politics: ‘Do you go to church?’ he asked. ‘Oh, Church of England. I see the Church of England is making overtures to the Church of Scotland. The Church ...”

“... moderated since the Sixties and Seventies, when characters with names like Samantha Light-body and Lady Driver frequented his work. But George Orwell for one would not have held this against him, and the truth is that Frayn is among the funniest novelists alive today. ‘Life, I have come to see, is nothing more nor less than another way of writing ...”

“... her and proceeded to undress: it did the trick. At a party Jung suggested to a German-American lady that her dislike of black coffee was linked to a desire to get pregnant; this offence against social manners distressed Mrs Jung, who later declared: ‘I am going to write a psychotherapeutic handbook for gentlemen.’ And speaking of the coincidence early ...”

“... is important in Wilde; and it is the unobtrusive source of some good jokes in Pinero – as when Lady Twomley, in The Cabinet Minister, tells her daughter, ‘Imogen, there is nothing for you but this marriage or contemptible, cleanly poverty,’ or when the apopleptic colonel in The Magistrate exclaims to the policeman who is rough-handling him: ‘Do you ...”

“... American Nancy Astor, née Langhorne, the first woman to sit in Parliament. Miss Cowles writes off Lady Astor as a silly, loquacious busybody – brave, ‘but it was sad to think she never really knew what to direct her courage against.’ She was more than that, and the Cliveden set deserves more than three pages even – or especially – if it did not ...”

“... world, is transformed in ‘Ash Wednesday’ into a purely visionary figure – a surrogate of Our Lady, an echo of Beatrice, the personal and human feeling all specialised into a channel for divine grace. Mr Moody notes, as few have done, that the first edition of ‘Ash Wednesday’ was dedicated ‘To My Wife’. There followed a period of commissioned and ...”

“... at the scene of his adventures was sifted through other writers, chief among them being an Eastern lady called Luise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, known for obvious reasons as Dame Shirley, whose letters from the California mines are a minor masterpiece of social observation, and from whom – irony of ironies – even Mark Twain seems to have picked up a trick ...”

“... Latin and remembered the awful embarrassment which I felt in the presence of this ancient maiden lady when we tried to do Catullus together, rumpled sheets and all. I looked out of the window onto the familiar view of Central Park in the empty classroom where I had spent senior year and heard the voices again. Then I left. In the subway downtown I thought ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be out of it.’ For this is the sixth floor.   Then I thought of Max’s story of the old lady who went to church with her ear trumpet. And so the stern Scotch sexton or verger or something, eyed her a bit. Then he said ‘Madam one toot and you’re oot.’ Perhaps that’s what it would be like, One toot and you’re oot. So she is half-like her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”