“... his social superiors. He deplored loose talk at official meetings and was much shocked to hear a Lady Robinson say, of one of a batch of prisoners: ‘I could break a commandment with him.’ He resented a Navy Commissioner’s ‘maid and whore’ being placed in his church pew. Yet the hypocrite had moral courage of a strange kind, as when he fired off a ...”

“... the latter.’ This is dangerously true. The idle or incompetent doctor, presented with an old lady suffering from aches and pains, or shortness of breath, or difficulty with memory, is tempted to collude with the general perception and say ‘It’s your age, dear’ rather than diagnose osteo-arthritis, cardiac failure or the adverse effects of ...”

“... she had tackled Johnson at the ball following Kennedy’s inauguration. LBJ first told her that Lady Bird was worried about his health and that a quiet spell would suit them both. Mrs Luce (as she told the story) snorted in disbelief: ‘Lyndon, come clean.’ Lyndon leaned closer: ‘Clare darling, I looked it up. One out of every four Presidents has died ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on the head. But whereas we used to let them grow up, allowing Liszt (if not Liberace) to become a lady-killer as well as a full-fledged artist, we no longer do. In fact, we see all men as infantile – all variations on a sitcom mentality (from Father Knows Best to Men Behaving Badly) that acknowledges feminist rage without questioning masculine privilege. We ...”

“... in a particularly subversive act of cataloguing, Edith Holden’s Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady has been granted the same classmark as the biographies of Einstein and the memoirs of local Nobel Prize-winners from Rutherford to Mott. In Georgina Ferry’s account, the career of Dorothy Hodgkin (née Crowfoot) stands at first sight as a cheering contrast ...”

“... The proceedings have moved towards their conclusion. The bearded poets and the grey-haired lady biographers have stamped their furry feet at the Minister for Rabbits, who has handled them firmly with his velveteen gloves. The genial Dickensian chairman is winding up the session in tones that tell us it’s all just a game but please do stay and join ...”

“... structures. Is the Spanish dolor ‘pain’ or ‘sorrow’ in English? Well, there is Our Lady of Sorrows, but you would need to speak to the doctor about your pain. How should we render a subjunctive which is not exactly a conditional, as in a phrase like ‘cuando yo me muera’? ‘When I die’ doesn’t catch any of it, but ‘if I should ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ball of discord now resolved as a tribute from Diana, her tutelary goddess. Philip Sidney in The Lady of May, the little entertainment he staged in 1578 at Leicester’s park and gardens of Wanstead, went so far as to impose an unscripted speaking part on the Queen, presumably without warning, forcing her to adjudicate between two fictional rival ...”

“... with ideas that belong to his Cambridge youth, but some are still vigorously alive: ‘To an Old Lady’, for instance, and ‘Camping Out’ and ‘Arachne’, ‘Legal Fiction’, and the beautiful ‘Villanelle’ which begins ‘It is the pain, it is the pain, endures.’ (Empson remarks with customary generosity on the technical superiority over his own ...”

“... direct sales concerns like the Realsilk Hosiery Company, Stanley Home Products and the ‘Avon Lady’. Avon, a cosmetics company, changed the gender dynamics by employing women to sell to women in the home. The ‘hostess party’ was the next step – a social gathering that was also an opportunity for selling. Here the pioneer was Wearever ...”

“... trust. Atovmyan claims to have witnessed more than a hundred performances of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth before the fateful Bolshoi performance attended by Stalin in January 1936 which led to the work’s denunciation in Pravda. Shostakovich was himself in Moscow that day on his way to a concert in Archangel. Shortly before leaving to catch his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and about his reading, which was more adventurous than one might have expected. It included Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses and Du côté de chez Swann. A word of mild and, as experience suggests, useless complaint about these volumes as physical objects. They are heavy and tightly bound – presumably to save space by reducing margins. You need both ...”