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“... looked like, or if they did no description survives. There is a drawing by Holbein labelled ‘Lady Parker’, and if this delicate wide-eyed child were really Jane, we would never entertain an evil thought about her. But it is almost certainly her brother’s wife, the heiress Grace Newport. How does a biographer work, without a single image to hold in ...”

“... Lady Macbeth had no children of course. She was haunted by blood. She could find no relief from it. Month After month. Perhaps when it first started She sat down in a little yellow attic room underneath A life-size poster of D. Cassidy wearing furry boots And, eyes ever widening, added up The likely number of days In her likely life when blood would Pour or flow or drip ...”

“... a Fabian socialist, a strike leader, and finally a Theosophist exactly as Mrs Siddons was a Lady Macbeth, Lady Randolph, Beatrice, Rosamund and Volumnia.’ Off-stage, her behaviour was often hard to bear. ‘Tyrannical’, ‘headstrong’, ‘proud’, ‘humourless’, ‘egotistic’ were only some of the ...”

“... a day and at such an hour, I was on the lookout for symbols and portents. The funeral rites of Lady Thatcher, the great leader celestially upgraded from her complimentary suite at the Ritz, began as our ferry, the Duchess M, butted out, cross-current, from the revived container stacks of Tilbury Riverside (Maritime). She was carrying an elderly couple and ...”

“... of chivalrous courtesy. When a lovestruck knight like Lancelot or Tristan pledged fealty to his lady, as a vassal would to a feudal lord, he undertook to serve her selflessly, asking for no recompense save the privilege of adoring her. Precisely because she belonged to another man, he had to sublimate his sexual desire through courageous deeds and romantic ...”

“... California, not a mile from the convent of the Sisters of Mary Immaculate, where the statue of Our Lady of Monterey is kept in a glass case, Marie finally catches up with Alex. Zomboid, glassy-eyed and brutally scarred, he is curiously silent about what has been happening to him. Yes, he came round in the morgue, knew that a mistake must have been made and let ...”

“... of them wearing lounge suits, the rest evening dresses and make-up. The organiser of the ball, Lady Austin (otherwise known as Austin S., a 24-year-old barman from Baron’s Court), was arrested along with 59 others. Lady Austin was not inclined to go quietly. Claiming to find a passing copper too dishy to be a real ...”

“... the visit the Queen sends her a bread-and-butter letter. It will actually have been written by a lady-in-waiting, though that is not explained in The Queen’s Knickers, which is a perfectly Queen-friendly book. It can be read as a variant on ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, except that it’s much less contemptuous: the attitude is ...”

“... from 1960 to the present day’, which deals briefly and brightly with obscenity cases from Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Fanny Hill to The Romans in Britain.* The aim is to investigate changes in public attitudes to ‘offensive literature’. It is a lively survey, but is not the useful history of that process which might be written. First of all, as ...”

“... the Thirties and Forties. The Hattersley family eventually climbed out: Enid, his mother, became Lady Mayoress of Sheffield and Roy a possible future prime minister. Like Mr Tebbitt’s celebrated parent, his father got on his bike, and at one time pedalled thirty miles each way to Barnsley on a machine with a front wheel so buckled it threw its rider into ...”

“... bony face does get brittler and bonier, the dry voice gets dryer. But there was always an older lady in the young woman, and there is a skittish young woman in the old lady. She wasn’t wiser than her years, but she was smarter and snappier than her years were supposed to be, whatever the years were. In Adam’s Rib ...”

“... and debonairly describing them to his Cambridge men friends and to his favourite woman confidante, Lady Melbourne. Raphael writes best about this first half of Byron’s career. He gets very close to his hero, not sentimentalising him or obscuring his weaknesses. Hobbled with a withered foot, a ridiculous mother, and an encumbered estate, Byron fought ...”

“... furious email Black wrote to Tom Bower, protesting that Bower’s forthcoming book about Lord and Lady Black was going to be ‘a heartwarming story of two sleazy, spivvy, contemptible people, who enjoyed a fraudulent and unjust elevation; were exposed, and ground to powder in a just system, have been ostracised; and largely impoverished, and that I am on my ...”

“... story here is a pastiche of British medical science and Orientalism. In 1717, the poet and critic Lady Mary Wortley Montagu fetched up in Constantinople with her husband, then the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte. She heard that certain old Greek Christian women in the city were performing what was called ‘ingrafting’. Turks in their thousands ...”

“... Lorenzo, have said that she was good-looking, ‘de muy buen parecer’, just not the grand lady of Quixote’s fantasies. The false Dulcinea not only brings the knight back to earth, she rubs his nose in it – or rather her nose, since she is said to be snub-nosed and round-faced, and not at all fair of feature, ‘no de muy buen rostro’. Games with ...”