“... success gives him the licence to misread his own gifts, and so we end up with a crazy film like Lady in the Water (2006). When Shyamalan took the script of Lady in the Water to his producers at Disney, they threw up their hands in bafflement. This maker of moving, intelligent thrillers now wanted to go mythological – it ...”

“... See, how this lady rises on her swing Encouraged by the brush of Fragonard, As light as love, as ruthless as the Czar, Who, from her height, looks down on everything. When on a canvas an oil-eye of blue Has tiny fissures, you can stand behind, Imagine time, observe, and condescend. Wink at, and spit on, those who are not you ...”

“... Of the latter Worsthorne reports ‘the personal antipathy everybody felt, including his wife, Lady Maude, to this cold and unattractive statesman’, but adds that at the age of five he himself could see the good-egg side of the man. He misses the chance to quote Constant Lambert’s limerick, especially composed for the nuptial night of Sir Samuel and ...”

“... My dear Lady Olliffe,’ Robert Browning wrote in March 1877: I have just been reading my old friend Miss Martineau’s protest against the publication – and indeed, retention – of all correspondence. Here, now, is a sample of mine: be assured I shall never demand it again, from any apprehension that hereafter the friendliness in it may be at variance with whatever feeling I please to entertain thirty years hence ...”

“... to run over narrow slings of webbing of which one end was held by a gentleman, the other by a lady. The “players” tossed the fox as it walked the tightrope – a good toss being up to twenty-four feet high. Augustus the Strong of Saxony was an enthusiastic fox-tosser and is reputed to have tossed to death some 687 foxes in one session.’ But hunters ...”

“... and plot to go around.’ The irony is a bit hefty, but the effects can be eerie and funny. The lady realtor – Heinemann’s text, one degree more post-structuralist than Vidal’s, calls her a ‘relator’ – remembers her former fictional life even when she is translated into the television series, and is able to talk to old friends across her ...”

“... and early modern: it opens and closes with the death in 1553 of Edward VI, the attempted coup of Lady Jane Grey and the accession of Mary Tudor, whose brief reign prepared the way for Elizabeth. In order to rule England, these women had to act with firmness, decision and, if necessary, brutality: they had, in short, to act like men. Yet by doing so they ...”

“... missing link – and perhaps too largely missing in this biography – was Asquith’s daughter, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, who had supported her father in his final election battles at Paisley at a time when the blackguardly ‘Coaly Liberals’ had deserted him in favour of Lloyd George and his Conservative partners. ...”

“... off with her father in the Midlands to visit the grandmother whose name she bore, the formidable Lady Margaret Beaufort. Beaufort was the dynast who was the real creator of Tudor royal power, and she had rebuilt her home at Collyweston, in Northamptonshire, in regal fashion as a triumphant expression of all that she had achieved in promoting the interests of ...”

“... for 12 different suicides on the one day, and the discretion to decide whether to place a lady suicide next to an Ohio convention. She used disguises in her journalism, many of them masculine, a masquerading habit that was to continue throughout her writing life. By now her own short-story writing was taking up much of her time. These early ...”

“... remote people’s republics? Then there is a picture of an uncommonly orgulous vessel captioned ‘Lady Ghislaine, Mirror Holdings’ ocean-going yacht’. Where is she normally berthed? (Not in Liechtenstein, that’s for sure.) On what missions is she normally employed? Is she ever used for Mirror works outings? Is she perhaps a ‘nice little earner’ when ...”

“... Mary Cassatt’s Lady at the Tea Table (1883-85) establishes her as one of the outstanding American painters of the 19th century. Indeed, it is one of the most remarkable portraits, American or not, of its time. A subtle combination of strength and fragility, the painting shows Mrs Riddle, Cassatt’s first cousin once removed ...”

“... Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1974, she was enough of a rarity on campus to be referred to as ‘the lady professor’; and when she joined a major law firm in Little Rock in 1977, it was as its first female attorney. By the time she became a partner, women still made up less than 10 per cent of practising lawyers in the States. Her subsequent firsts were far ...”

“... does the king understand by it? Or again: ‘Once upon a time, in Gavirate, there was a little old lady who spent her days counting other people’s sneezes.’ And now we are in the world of middle-class control, eavesdropping and gossiping. The unseemly vitality of the sneeze. The little old lady gets her comeuppance in a ...”

“... visiting country houses and playing sardines – ‘For an hour [at Hackwood] Ld Londonderry, Lady Curzon, Biddy Carlisle, Jean Norton [and] the Aga Khan lay under a very hot bed’ – there was the London Season and its gruelling round of cocktail parties, dinners, suppers and balls. Channon had the arriviste’s anxiety that he might be ‘in Society ...”