“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Heaney would, I suppose, approve of the angelic turn that Watkins’s verse was to take. In The Lady with the Unicorn (1948) there is an efflorescence of Neo-Platonism and a rather gnostic form of Christianity. The emerging poetic now refines and examines symbols in order to explore elevated states rather than compounding them, the better to inter the poet ...”

“... thanks to her cruel parents, a key character’s sister in The Priest of Evil is an alcoholic bag lady who ‘won’t live much longer’. Jo Nesbø’s The Redbreast bucks the trend – but only because it adheres too rigidly to other Scandinavian thriller conventions. Nesbø’s hero, Harry Hole, is an off-the-peg maverick detective whose alcoholism and ...”

“... spread about a marriage that would have made Winifred in fact what she was in effect, the First Lady of Nazism; even members of the Führer’s circle, even his secretary, thought the couple were having an affair, gossiping about Hitler’s ‘Bayreuth Treatment’ – a view Hamann dismisses out of hand. Whether consummated or not, the relationship was ...”

“... and each line contains the name of a flower, a tree, a fruit, a reference to game, a famous old lady and the word ‘bathtub’: ‘In the apple tree Queen Mary of the Chrysanthemums shared a grape rook bathtub with her insect lamp.’ In a simpler form, this approach worked well with groups of children. In Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to ...”

“... be normal and give a man a level playing-field, a fair break. He was like a gambler convinced that lady luck will be on his side, depending on a profound misunderstanding of the nature of probability. Crane calls his planning ‘brinkmanship’. Scott blamed ‘Providence’, a curious Edwardian compromise between a Victorian God who manages the affairs of men ...”

“... and convert to Christianity), and is rescued from despair when he fathers the child of a ‘loving lady chimpanzee’: ‘In sum, a worthy primate evolution demanded, besides a few macroevolutionary lucky breaks, a basis of brainpower; and commencing with a combination of man-chimp child, the two most intelligent of God’s creatures might produce this new ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”