“... but the cheque never arrives: ‘You fool, you fool, he told himself . . . his aunt was an old lady, any number of things could have happened to her during the year. But you couldn’t wait, could you?’ There is no one he can tap for money. Juleson has a month to make the repayment before one of Oberholster’s short-fused debt collectors will run him ...”

“... nice melody, I like that.’ It happened when I was going to fetch you at the station, some young lady said: ‘Yes, I like to hear that.’ I’m sure that my musical quality is much greater than that of the girl who divorced me. I used to sing also in a choir, so I can have a good voice. My speaking voice is rather flat, but my singing voice is ...”

“... hauled off to unfamiliar and impermanent surroundings, and looked after by a strange German lady.’ In the end, the divorce decree was granted. Andrew was given custody of the children for eight months a year, Nora for four, but she was forbidden to remove them from Allegheny County without Andrew’s or the court’s written approval. In 1920, Mellon ...”

“... occasion of my mother’s telling), she screamed at the doctors who informed her that when a young lady gets a bad headache the reason is that she’s been thinking too hard, and they ejected her (despite her screaming) from the emergency room into a thunderstorm. I like to think that if I am in line for a brain fever I shall be better prepared than my mother ...”

“... struck up a sexual liaison with one William Alder, who was discovered by a servant in bed with Lady Portsmouth while Portsmouth himself lay by the couple’s side, apparently asleep. It was troilism with a new twist. This, too, would serve later as evidence of his lunacy. It was proper for Alder to attend his wife at night, the earl insisted, since she was ...”

“... realism, Agatha Christie, Marguerite Duras and D.H. Lawrence. (‘If I could write a novel like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I would die happy,’ she often gushed. Of course, ditto for me.)If there’s a whisper of satire here it’s never amplified – and satire as a genre is more shouty than whispery. Danlin’s opening self-presentation is close to ...”

“... was raised to the peerage as Baron Snow of Leicester by the Labour government in 1964, she became Lady Snow in private life.Whose obituary is this? Johnson published a scandalous, bestselling novel at the age of 23. By the time she married Snow, her second husband, she had written 13 books. The biographical note to these new Hodder editions says, somewhat ...”

“... 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 ...”