“... different from the one around them. In a bold-faced piece of bohemianism, the utopianists of Lady Mary Fox’s Account of an Expedition to the interior of New Holland (1837) hold casual buffets rather than dinner parties. In Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1778), utopia is a country mansion in Cornwall, an anodyne English pastoral in ...”

“... two retinues got out of hand. When hogsheads of French wine were washed up at Preston in Sussex, Lady Shirley asked her steward to send them up to London ‘so we may drink it, which will end the dispute with the commissions of the customs’.When goods went missing it was always easy to blame the people who actually heaved them from the sea. Sir John ...”

“... being for crying out loud.’ A maid reassures her interlocutor: ‘Your grandmother was a kind lady, not like the people I used to work for before.’In one monologue the host of a radio show observes that ‘there are numerous varieties of Lagos accents from the posh to the unvarnished and there are accents inflected with the residue of various native ...”

“... felicitous accretive consequences: the suburbs of Brussels; Aachen cathedral; Albi cathedral; Our Lady of Bruges; the Fahle Building in Tallinn. These are exceptions to the rule of the Olympic Park pile-up, which is what happens when an environmental liability such as le gougnafier (Macron’s nickname for the Prime Shit Emeritus) seeks its precious ...”

“... Bacon. Buckingham renovated his homes at great expense and shared them with his wife, the heiress Lady Katherine Manners, daughter of the earl of Rutland. They had four children, three of whom survived. Buckingham invited Balthazar Gerbier, an architect and painter, into his household, and Gerbier began to amass an enviable collection of Italian and Dutch ...”

“... audience was definitely not high-brow – indeed the former is a body whose usual faire is Lady Nairne’s songs or a demonstration of country dancing … one fat comfortable elderly wife … took every point in the most unexpected way … you certainly got them.’ Yet they are ill at ease with being rarefied: ‘I’m not really a literary ...”

“... the chancel of St George’s Church. According to the parish register she was ‘A virginia Lady borne’ as well as John Rolfe’s wife, Rebecca. (In 1635 their son, Thomas, raised in England, returned to Virginia where he became a successful tobacco planter.) Sometimes the ancestral homes of native visitors were destroyed by fire and farming, their ...”

“... June 1949, at the Boeuf sur le Toit cabaret, the beginning of her seven-decade reign as the first lady of French chanson. Both the venue and the song were selected by Gréco’s unlikely svengali, Jean-Paul Sartre. François Mauriac, three years away from his Nobel Prize, was in the audience. So was Marlon Brando. After the concert he gave Gréco a ride home ...”

“... became more formalised in the early 20th century, and in 1915 the Waifs and Strays appointed a ‘lady visitor’ to check on girls after they left the homes. Children sent overseas (migration to Canada continued until 1930) were less well cared for and little effort was made to ensure they transitioned successfully into adult life. ‘I am doing ...”

“... for several years. Nevertheless, Thatcher went on to win elections in 1983 and 1987. Her the-lady’s-not-for-turning episode was an inspiration for Liz Truss during her short and calamitous stay in 10 Downing Street. Truss, unfortunately, wasn’t aware that on the issue of monetarism, the lady was for turning.It’s ...”

“... in itself. The curator has small silver paws, very like the paws of the ermine in the painting Lady with Ermine, now on display in the nation’s other museum, which the visiting lecturer had been told was not worth visiting. After the tour, as they exit the storage room, an older man walks beside the curator whispering, Stop blushing, just be ...”

“... imagine what would have happened ‘if it had occurred to Lucrece to slap Tarquin’s face’. The lady who performs this virtuous gesture is revealed, in a graceful pay-off at the end, to be rather less chaste than the gesture implies. Her husband, who maintains a Beppo-like complaisance as long (and only as long) as he doesn’t know there is something to be ...”

“... has ruthlessly dumped in a disagreeable Home for aged persons; she contrives that the smelly old lady shall go on a visit to her daughter and then be refused readmittance to the Home on the score of an incontinence which Ruth has cleverly faked. Bobbo is an accountant. Ruth manages to insinuate herself covertly into his office and cook and confuse his books ...”

“... two-seater aeroplane and reclaimed their respective wives. (‘Quite like a sensational novel,’ Lady Sackville noted in her diary.) The relationship didn’t really end until some time in 1922. Wild oats are all very well, Vita wrote to Harold, but not ‘when they grow as high as a jungle’. Nigel Nicolson was three the year his mother eloped. Vita ...”

“... for in return. Leading examples of Scott’s oiling of royalty are his James V of Scotland in The Lady of the Lake (1809), Queen Caroline, consort of George II, as a healing principle of Mercy in The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and Queen Elizabeth I, epitome of successful English monarchs, in Kenilworth (1821). Sutherland is especially dismissive of ...”