“... warm and pretend to be busy. The financial pages are ‘in brisk demand’. One nicely-spoken old lady wears a fur coat pinned with diaper pins and gym shoes with no laces. The social history of Howland’s stories is focused on several generations of a single Jewish family. A long-dead great-grandmother from Romania wore gypsy scarves and earrings and read ...”

“... from that made by his predecessor, Alexandra Shulman, whose mother had co-authored a book called Lady Behave: A Guide to Modern Manners. Shulman writes in her memoir that she only needs to ‘put on a Chanel jacket and a pair of heels and immediately I can be seen … as somebody who, at some point, edited Vogue’.Vogue had, of course, played a huge part in ...”

“... it had been important for their initial success that not only was she not an artist, she was not a lady. Instead she was a star, the very first in her field. As such, she has inspired several star-biographies, of which Madsen’s is the latest. The biographies of Chanel that were attempted during her lifetime had to be given up, because interviewing her proved ...”

“... the social-financial Wharton and the artist for whose sake we are interested in the society lady with the formidable wealth. The reader of Benstock’s book may soon wish to go back to Lewis’s Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975). It was Lewis who first told us about Wharton’s affair with Fullerton and who printed the puzzling erotic text of ...”

“... in other words, had gone through the curriculum laid down in “A Letter to a Very Young Lady” and had emerged with first-class honours.’ But this is no sneer; Ehrenpreis, an honourable professor, is not cadgingly crying down his line of work. He is aware that education is not the be-all and end-all, but it is at least a begin-all, of life. Much ...”

“... really meant. ‘I said just now that Signor Crespi’s portrait’ – a painting of a lady now in the National Gallery in London and agreed to be a Titian, but proposed by Berenson as a copy of a Giorgione – had a certain family resemblance to the one of the former Doetsch Collection. There, however, barring morphological details, the likeness ...”

“... for female beauty remained Margaret Lockwood, Hitchcock’s other early star (so good in The Lady Vanishes), whose top eyelids were sootily shadowed, mascara’d and lined, but whose lower lids remained untouched. Elsie’s eyeliner days were long behind her; her grooming consisted of Pond’s Cold Cream, a spritz of L’Air du Temps and a dab of Max ...”

“... playing cards in an Outdoor Party by Esaias van de Velde. The precise message of Gerrit Dou’s Lady at Her Toilet might be difficult to articulate, but the mirror and open bird-cage suggest that we are looking at a commentary on vanity and desire – assuming, of course, that Dou meant us to recall both the vanitas associations of mirrors and the fact that ...”

“... institute. But going ‘up West’ to South Ken she enjoyed the attentions of doctors and their lady wives, barristers, broadcasters and scientists. The daughter of a plumber and gas-fitter, she had the Countess Nora eating out of her hand.Inevitably the scene darkens. More and more sittings; more elaborate and invasive tests of authenticity. Alma strips ...”

“... security. Because Ivanov, an attaché at the Soviet Embassy, had also been involved with the lady in the case, ergo in Labour’s view Profumo was a security risk. Mr Profumo was inexcusably at fault in lying about his association with Christine Keeler. But of all the lies that have been told in the House of Commons, Jack Profumo’s denial of any ...”

“... and so on). Music is also a source of happiness: ‘I played “Slippery People” and “Lady Marmalade” three times each,’ said Archie. ‘The thing that bugs me about listening to my records is that nobody ever sees me when I’m happy, and if they did they wouldn’t understand.’ Archie, age 24, is still a dependent. He gets along well with ...”

“... and his stepfather, George Wyndham, a Byronically dashing soldier-poet. Bend’Or’s mother, Lady Sibell Lumley, was so beautiful – although, some felt, a bit silly – she was the toast of London: her brother said that after her first husband’s early death 80 men were in love with her. After being unhappy at prep school (where he was, as the ...”

“... sort of person from Richard Hoggart, ‘the grammar school extramural lecturer’ who at the Lady Chatterley trial succeeded, to the amazement and amusement of Our Age, in putting down ‘the Treasury counsel from Eton and Cambridge’. The single most irritating thing about this book is the constant prosopopoeic repetition of the expression ‘Our ...”

“... myself’: also she wanted the messenger alive, to hear from him that Octavia was old and ugly. Lady Macbeth would have killed Duncan as he slept, except that he resembled her father; she did at least incriminate the grooms by smearing them with blood, though later she was troubled with thick-coming fancies that kept her from her rest. And in real, recent ...”

“... freed from the tiresome necessity of ever doing any real work. Amanda Cross’s Kate Fansler is a lady of private means and an English professor at Columbia to boot, so that is her excuse for living the life of Reilly. But both Wilson and Dunant’s heroines are unattached bohemians who have the street-credible attitudes of the poor, while appearing to live ...”