“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Valentino, staying together at San Francisco’s St Francis Hotel while filming Moran of the Lady Letty, enjoyed a brisk and bacchic itinerary: After shooting outdoors from seven in the morning until seven at night, they’d bathe, put on bathrobes, and order dinner in. Then they’d sleep a few hours, setting the alarm for midnight. After they got up ...”

“... 18th century, had a robust attitude towards medical ethics. Introduced to smallpox inoculation by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had seen it used in Turkey (scrapings from the pocks of the infected were dabbed onto a lightly bleeding cut), she was keen to use it on her own daughters. But she wanted to test it on someone else first, so she tried it on six ...”

“... into streams and how to kill sentries noiselessly from behind.’ There would be no quarter for ‘lady finger-breakers’ joining up to any amazon corps. The drivel pouring out of Hamburg was easily discounted, yet there must have been not a few who remembered how the Germans treated francs-tireurs and their protectors in 1914. At Dinant, in Belgium, there is ...”

“... a decade later it was the NSA that detailed the dénouement in a series of terse despatches: ‘lady ace’ – the Ambassador’s helicopter – ‘is on the roof. he states that he will load 25 pax and that this will leave 45 remaining hence they need more choppers.’ During the Cultural Revolution, the NSA listened in as Red Guards quoted Mao to one ...”

“... fan, a schmoozer. Imagine if Orson Welles had never bothered to direct films again after The Lady from Shanghai, just bullshitted on talk shows, reliving his great moments. Like Welles, Stan Lee’s great moments were beset by authorship disputes. Lee’s particular emphasis on Spider-Man as Marvel’s signature creation may have had something to do with ...”

“... A young English publisher on holiday in France comes across a compatriot, a ‘genteel’ elderly lady who lost her nest-egg in the 1929 slump. The rainy day has come and she wants to sell her story. It is, the publisher discovers, an exciting one. Fanny, her testament records, was born in 1857 and raised as the daughter of Duke Hopwood, proprietor of the ...”

“... statutes for a headmaster, an usher and 70 ‘poor and needy’ scholars, much more typical was Lady Katherine Berkeley’s foundation at Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire two years later, with endowments of £17 a year to provide for a schoolmaster, two scholars, and free lessons for anyone who wanted them. These less ambitious institutions have usually ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a certain institutional comedy of shame was set in plaster. Freud didn’t get a look in, but Our Lady did, and we all lived as if the turmoil of life was ordained by higher beings. Priests were sometimes engaged to preside over pledges and to maintain the status quo in a bad marriage, but I found it hard – even harder, I think, than my brothers did – to ...”

“... lords took the opportunity to spell it out. Bogdanor cites the storm warnings given by Lord Steyn, Lady Hale and Lord Hope. Hope, one of the Scottish law lords, said: ‘Parliamentary sovereignty is no longer, if it ever was, absolute … Step by step, gradually but surely, the English principle of the absolute legislative sovereignty of Parliament … is ...”

“... a range of small kindnesses, like the two Islington wives who got ‘a pipkyn of pottage’ from Lady Taylbushe and some alms from local notables, but still had to send their children to ‘good houses, to aske a mese of pottage or such other victualls’. Nobody would give credit to someone ‘on the parish’, so they could never get off it; charity was a ...”