“... say, because a lot cannier, is the one on the upper floor of a village inn in Mary E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The scheming protagonist ventures along it in search of the room occupied by her husband’s nephew, Robert, who is hot on her (bigamous) trail. ‘She stopped and looked at the number on the door. The key was in the lock, and her ...”

“... for William Paget, one of the King’s Councillors. Two years later, he managed to secure for Lady Cobham the cinnamon she wanted, but failed to source black satin from Venice. Writing to Lord Cobham in 1546 about the possibility of English merchant shipping being menaced by French warships out of Dieppe, he included ‘a little clout with needles’ for ...”

“... decomposition to the miracles they performed. Pilgrims flocked to relic shrines such as Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk or Santiago de Compostela in Galicia to experience these material manifestations of holiness as intimately as possible. They wanted not just to see the relics but to touch them and kiss them, and they hoped to take home something ...”

“... carried a weapon wherever he went, even on holiday: he used a hammer on a man trying to do an old lady out of her pennies in an arcade. They weren’t much older when they were shown, by their grinning father, their paternal grandfather’s dead body in its open casket. And they were still young – ‘all scared like little white rabbits’ – when they ...”

“... is thrilling but dangerous. Carney avoids places with frequent reports of muggings (‘an old lady carrying groceries hit on the head’) and keeps instead to the well-lit Riverside Drive, one of Harlem’s few affluent residential streets. He has an almost naive faith in the American Dream: ‘You came from one place but more important was where you ...”

“... sending material ‘of the most filthy and obscene character’ to Adelaide Fenton, a fashionable lady of Bath who was ‘not in the least acquainted’ with him, charged with the intention to ‘corrupt and debauch’ her. Colonel Forbes fled to France, and a £50 reward was offered for information leading to his arrest, together with a description: ‘about ...”

“... returned from India in 1619, Roe was still only 38. Thereafter accompanied by his intrepid wife, Lady Eleanor, he subsequently spent seven years during the 1620s as the Levant Company’s ambassador to the Ottoman court in Constantinople, followed by diplomatic missions to Denmark, Poland and the Holy Roman Empire amid the convulsions of the Thirty ...”

“... to look.’ Elizabeth Sampson, hauled before the bishop of London, put it more succinctly: Our Lady of Willesden ‘was a brent ars Elfe’. But as bishops went hunting through parishes for heresy, they also found people who held the old ways disturbingly close, with a fervent belief in the power of ritual words. In 1520, Henry Lillyngstone was charged by ...”

“... Ireland, against her husband’s wishes, is reminiscent of Isabel Archer’s in The Portrait of a Lady, when she travels to see the dying Ralph against her husband’s wishes:‘Was he very bad about your coming?’‘He made it very hard for me. But I don’t care.’‘Is it all over, then, between you?’‘Oh, no; I don’t think anything is ...”

“... Henry James writes of a very grand lady that she had ‘an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias Canetti. Behind its approachable modesty, its avoidance of every publicity and image-making process, there is a loftiness, an assurance, a stance of absolute superiority ...”

“... Duc d’Alençon, and whose characteristic style of dress was about as plain and godly as that of Lady Gaga. It is equally odd, as Margaret Tudeau-Clayton’s splendid new book meticulously points out, that another is still William Shakespeare.The truth is that, for all the enthusiastic assertions of Major Longden and his ilk, Shakespeare has always been ...”

“... saying: ‘Come along, mother, I’ll take you upstairs.’ On the way out of the room the old lady passes an open piano on which (this is the stroke of genius) she suddenly hits a petulant discord. It lasts all of a minute and is worth a dozen pages of dialogue. Why it’s advertising ice cream I’m not sure. 26 September. A call from Channel 4 wanting ...”

“... Banking. She became the ‘village elder’ for younger colleagues: ‘She could be kind of a fat lady with big hair and a bohemian, but she was trying to do the right thing for the right reasons,’ her boss admitted. Life in New York was cold, hard and expensive. Soon she fled back to Jakarta for a better paying job with the Indonesian State Ministry for ...”

“... his own successful elopement story in reverse, like a counterfactual thought experiment. A married lady sits by her window and catches the eye of the handsome Duke: ‘She looked at him, as one who awakes, – /The past was a sleep, and her life began.’ But no sooner has life begun than they have both started to find reasons to put it off for the time ...”

“... house where I lived for nearly fifty years. Not a bit of it is the truth, with the filming of The Lady in the Van two years ago more the real conclusion. Now the house looks much as it did when I first saw it in 1968, though then there were perches for parrots in the garden and one in the bay window, with upstairs gas meters in every room as during the war it ...”