“... outside the windows, and you could smell them. There were insects, too. Good insects, crickets and lady-bugs. Owens had purchased ten thousand and released them into the yard.’ This is the dream squared: though Owens is not a media mogul, he has something of the absurd hubris of the great days of Hollywood, the world of colossal, innocent artifice. He keeps ...”

“... a century earlier, the most famous mesmeric invalid had been Harriet Martineau, a powerful single lady and popular journalist. She had had to take to her bed with what was believed to be uterine cancer, and was eventually persuaded to try mesmeric healing. After a number of treatments from different people her health improved dramatically; more, she underwent ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... effect’, and in doing so reinforces an overall sense of necessity. The Portrait of a Lady tells us that Ralph Touchett accompanies Henrietta Stackpole to look at the pictures in the long gallery of his father’s country house the day after they have been boating together, but we know that it could have been three days later, or five. The time is ...”

“... which we have jettisoned, but the 1950s still possessed. My favourite is the Emasculating Lady Psychologist – a cross between Hannah Arendt and the Wicked Witch of the West – who heads the firm’s research department, appears in the first episode and then, alas, isn’t invited back to exhibit her horribly fake German accent until Episode ...”

“... step was the publication in the Illustrated London News on 24 February of an engraving of the ‘Lady with the Lamp’. In early May she visited Balaclava and was received by cheering soldiers. On 13 May she collapsed and was laid low with fever. Her case was said to be as bad as any; recovery took weeks. What caused her illness? Bostridge is too ...”

“... mechanisms of elite influence retained their power. It was Fielding’s well-connected cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who engineered his youthful entrée into the theatre world; she was the dedicatee of his first play, and the driving force behind his burlesque of the Dunciad, which survives only in manuscript draft. (It may be that this particular ...”

“... when the Catholic community of Tollington Park in London, following ‘a campaign of prayer to Our Lady’, exchanged their small church (capacity 140) and £35,000 for the larger Congregationalist church (capacity 1300) across the road. Reading Delaney, it’s hard not to think of the Poles in contemporary Britain. The same anxiety about poor housing, wage ...”

“... or else by accident. But ‘appeal to accident’ isn’t a mode of explanation. Luck isn’t a lady, tonight or any other night – nor a blind force either. If I ask you how you holed the ball in one and you reply ‘Sheer luck,’ you haven’t offered me an explanation: you’ve ruled out one particular explanation by indicating that it wasn’t because ...”