“... did as she pleased, though she was ruthlessly hard to please. Moore became a cult figure, the old lady in the tricorne hat who threw the first pitch of the baseball season, went to prize fights with George Plimpton, dined with Cassius Clay, as he then was, and was hired, unavailingly, to give a name to a new Ford car. On the whole people think rather little ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have been behind FDR New Deal progress and against the self-indulgent obscurantism of the old lady. Now, even the TVA man, in the appealing person of Montgomery Cift, falls victim, not only to the old lady’s granddaughter (Lee Remick), but to the ‘rugged individualism’ of grandma’s stand. Here Kazan’s ...”

“... suffragette era (see, for example, Mellors’s denunciation of his first wife’s beaked vagina in Lady Chatterley’s Lover). However, comradely love would eschew penetration, being limited to the intimacies meticulously defined in the wrestling match between Birkin and Gerald. Lawrence further underlined this point by his portrait of degenerate Eros in the ...”

“... in Islington, the highlight of which was the entry of a nervous, near-naked strip-o-gram lady who sat on Neil’s knee and slowly removed his shirt and vest. While everyone else hovered on the edge of death by embarrassment, Neil, according to one unlucky lunching companion, ‘looked entirely at home’. It fitted his image of himself. Later in the ...”

“... Julian Critchley, one of the Whitbread judges, wrote an article in which he blamed the ‘Corps of Lady Novelists’ for her victory. The book, he said, ‘resembles the Life of Jackie Charlton as written by Beryl Bainbridge’. He clearly meant this as a huge insult – but to whom? Interviewers who had not had time to look at the book went to see Atkinson ...”

“... actress. Not on stage or in her films, but in life, where she was both director and leading lady and could get away with anything. Other people orbiting around her were assigned the minor parts. ‘After all,’ she mumbled, as she was dying, ‘it so happens that I have genius. I’m used to it now.’ Adler met Marguerite Duras in prose before meeting ...”

“... lire. With an embarrassed smile, Giovanni tells me that his father built a house here for an old lady – it had a large garden, three storeys and a lift – whose income derived entirely from the sale of these trinkets. I come from a Methodist background, and I’m uneasy with icons and relics, but my objections here are mainly aesthetic – too many ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I Have Known, All Souls in My Time and so on; not to mention his fixation on the Dark Lady). No such luck. Ollard is a careful biographer and does his best with the early years (when Rowse was an unsuccessful Labour Party candidate in Cornwall, struggling with illness and writing imaginative local history). But it is only the elderly Rowse who ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the lives of a curate, a Nonconformist headmaster, a stonemason, a nurse, a middle-class ‘young lady’ and so on. It is like being set down in the crowd in one of Frith’s paintings and being able to hear the conversations. The diaries are full of interest and surprise but they are smothered by the editing and design of the book, which give a new boost to ...”