“... make into a movie. The Woman and the Ape, however, is simply a disaster. Imagine the situation in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: the husband frigid, the wife discontented, the boyfriend an outsider, but sensitive and virile. With, however, this difference: the Mellors character is an ape. Not like an ape, mind you; an ape sans phrase. Surely, you will say, this ...”

“... The house in which I was billeted was the house of a well-to-do man, but the only occupant was the lady of the house, and she was advanced in years. Her three sons had gone to the war. One had been killed, another had been wounded and was in hospital, and the third was at that time in the trenches. There are miles of difference between the women of India and ...”

“... was the Chief Commissioner of the Girl Guides. The only drawback was that Andrew was a womaniser. Lady Caroline Percy, one of his other girlfriends at this time, says that ‘Andrew behaved abominably’, but Camilla was ‘desperate to marry him’. In 1970 Andrew took up with the 19-year-old Princess Anne: Tyrrel borrows from another royal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tiara by Cartier. Not particularly spectacular as Cartier tiaras go, it was once the property of Lady Marguerite Allan, who took it with her when she sailed from New York on 1 May 1915 on board the Lusitania. Six days later, off the Irish coast, a German U-boat torpedoed the ship, which sank in 18 minutes with the loss of 1198 lives. Among the survivors were ...”

“... performed by the actress Selma Vaz Dias. Vaz Dias had played the part of a lying passenger in The Lady Vanishes: ‘There has been no English ...”

“... by Heinkels. When Antony eyeballed her Coppertone tits and bum He was looking at Actium. Shake it, lady. Shake it for the Afrika Korps. Where the sea meets the desert there is always, There is always the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”