“... privilege to examine the secret financial relationships of MPs. Summoning his allies, including Lady Thatcher and Lord Archer in the House of Lords, Hamilton inspired an amendment to the Defamation Act then going through Parliament. The amendment, which was drummed through both Houses by the Tory majority, who behaved exactly as if they were being ...”

“... to the Gulf. I find the absence of Bucket ‘n’ Mop or Meat-Packin’ Barbies, let alone Bag Lady or Total Acne Barbies, more predictable than Rand seems to do. Fantasy doesn’t require manipulation to tend upward, even as far as the glass ceiling of female achievement; and a mass-market doll has no call to be an inventory of reality, just as the ...”

“... new and stylish ideological fantasy, notably in the recast tales of The Bloody Chamber. Her ‘Lady of the House of Love’, one of the items in this wide-ranging anthology, begins by making a skilfully precise use of the Gothic standby in which normality and enlightenment seem to have triumphed, but can one be quite sure? ‘At last the revenants became ...”

“... Diana Cooper to think of him as boringly tethered by fatherhood. He would also not have wished his lady-friend’s attention to be distracted from his own interesting personal development. Even so, it does seem that his dislike of young Auberon was genuine, (‘I think I must have been a difficult child to like,’ says the obliging Bron. And here, too, he was ...”

“... had again made state ownership popular and acceptable that Labour abandoned it’. Nor is the Lady allowed to escape. He quotes her, when a shadow minister of power in the Sixties, giving very cogent reasons why the great utilities, with the possible exception of coal, should remain publicly owned monopolies – as against those in her Party who would ...”

“... Norah knows to be her father. Afterwards, ‘I came out, and sat down with my make-up nice. The lady will have the ice cream, I think.’ The eternal actress. Norah struggles to adjust to this discovery, this whole new past and present: ‘I think about my mother raped. I think about my father, who did not deserve a name. And I do not know how I can ...”

“... Law was widely travelled, but the wanderings of this gambler-adventurer and his common law wife, Lady Katherine Knowles, were not entirely voluntary. In 1694 he killed a well-connected gentleman called Edward Wilson in a quarrel in London, and, although he managed to escape from England after a period in jail, he remained for much of his life an outlaw in ...”

“... into something we already know. Aubrey, always unmarried, saved some of his most fervent prose for Lady Venetia Stanley, ‘a most beautifull, desireable Creature’, and the subject of endless court gossip: ‘a most lovely sweet turn’d face, delicate darke browne haire … her face, a short ovall, darke-browne eie-browe: about which much sweetness, as also ...”

“... committed any scarlet sins they would have been made public long ago. His elderly infatuation with Lady Juliet Duff, subject of many epigrams, was probably no more than that, and Pearce has nothing to say about it, unlike Wilson. The death of his wife, after which he wore black for life, was a dividing mark in his career. There were fewer of those ...”

“... Nobody’s ever called Eliot Bolivar’s poems work.’ The invitation is from an ‘old toady lady’ called Madame Crommelynck, who has been passing the poems on to the vicar for publication (Jason hasn’t realised that the vicar no longer lives in the vicarage). Mitchell’s fans last encountered Madame Crommelynck as a teenage temptress in 1920s ...”

“... trouper, Roy Workman, and late in 1926 they set out for Europe calling themselves Lord and Lady Workman-Macnaghten of Belfast. How Louis met Myrtle is not clear, but he quickly detached her from Roy, whom she never divorced. In 1928, in a London Register Office, Myrtle Jones bigamously became Mme Darquier de Pellepoix, despised by Louis’s family and ...”

“... his conviction that the king was leading the country back to a Commonwealth or his description of Lady Denham, the Duke of York’s mistress, ‘bitchering’. For most of his married life, Evelyn lived at Sayes Court, Deptford, of which nothing at all remains. Apart from an idealised plan of the garden, only descriptions in letters and building accounts give ...”

“... appearance – his malacca cane. (Trapnel’s response to the destruction of his last novel by Lady Widmerpool is to hurl his precious cane into the canal where the manuscript is slowly sinking.) At 21, Julian left France to try his luck in London. Publication was still a long way off; in the meantime, he practised for the role of the writer. The ...”

“... Eagleton as George McGovern’s running mate. The Shrivers’ daughter Maria was later First Lady of California as the wife, subsequently estranged, of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Edward Kennedy thought his moment had come in 1980, when an opportunity seemed to open to topple the sitting president, a weakened Jimmy Carter, from the Democrat ...”

“... I hung my head, dropped my shoulders and tried to feel wrecked. ‘Are you all right?’ a kind lady at the next table asked. I had to admit I was. But what of Jones? Would he recover? How long would it take? ‘Snow Storm – Steam-boat off a Harbour’s Mouth’ (c.1842) ‘The Blue Rigi, Sunrise’ (1842) ‘Rain, Steam and Speed – the Great Western ...”