“... 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 ...”

“... just seen his mistress through a bad abortion, the other writing two letters daily to the young lady who was about to ditch him for a (rather younger) member of his Cabinet. However, though his positions are more defensible, since they allow him to claim less in practice than he hints at in theory, they do not actually help Clarke answer his ‘question of ...”

“... vast stone edifice filled with Scribes and Pharisees: it is an intimate domestic interior. The old lady behind the boy is in a bed, perhaps a day-bed – you can see bed-curtains, not to mention a night-cap; she is conceivably Joseph’s mother, Rachel, who bore him very late in life (though she was actually dead by this stage of Joseph’s existence). The ...”

“... weakened it (‘I always thought we went a bridge too far’), but it was the conclusive line. Lady Browning was not satisfied, however; according to her, Dirk Bogarde, playing her husband, said it in a murmur. On his retirement from the Army Boy was appointed Comptroller of Princess Elizabeth’s household and spent the rest of his working life at ...”

“... impact on the future. The great Maastricht debate was mainly prosecuted by politicians who, from Lady Thatcher downwards, believed it was the moment to fix a Maginot line beyond which the previous momentum for integration would not pass. The terms of the argument they made therefore tended to be inward-looking and, above all, anachronistic. They worried more ...”

“... of his mistresses, the woman a willing but ofttupped victim, while a third, the belaboured lady’s sister, naps beneath the bouncing bed where she’s been staying out of love’s way until tale-time comes and she can clear her throat to request a bit of post-coital edification and escape. Sex doesn’t save the women the King beds. Their cries of ...”