“... more than a little sympathy with the citizens who are not interested in being chatted to by the lady from the BBC. She is looking for things to respond to, and when there is a shortage of them carries you forward with an account of her time in the theatre, or of a conversation about nappy rash with one of the men from the BBC. James Campbell drinks too much ...”

“... Molina called for someone to come forward and make a few remarks. As a rule, some ‘little old lady’ (viejita) would approach the microphone and make a short speech. (The Monsignor had his viejitas too, whom we had seen leaving his Mass that same day, chattering away about the Sandinistas as if they were a rival neighbourhood clan.) The viejitas of ...”

“... great case, had no outstanding interrogation to his credit, and was conspicuously worsted by Lady Sackville in the contest over the will of Sir John Murray Scott. And, when his political prospects conflicted with his professional obligations, as in the Lever libel case, he put political prospects first. As a politician, his searing assaults on the ...”

“... to his daughter Mary) and possessed to his dying day the skin and cherubic shape of a Rubens lady – as did Mao Tse-tung. General Richardson’s concern with homosexuality stems from a passionate desire to lessen the guilt and unhappiness which have traditionally accompanied the sublimation of homosexual instincts. This aspect of his book strikes me as ...”

“... a less than wholeheartedly sensuous response. Certainly the idea of actually mounting the lovelorn lady is at first repellent to the Gulliver in him. He responds to her advances by citing Biblical interdictions against cross-breeding of all kinds, and human mating with beasts in particular. But she stumps him by asking whether he thinks of her as a beast, and ...”

“... This one contains neither. Incidentally, among other vast lacunae, it makes no mention at all of Lady Falkender (Joe Haines gets a single passing reference and his name misspelled in the index), of the mysterious allegations about the role of the South Africans in the Thorpe affair, or of the astonishing – disgraceful and unforgivable – resignation ...”

“... with their commissioning of Holroyd as biographer) with ‘rampant commercialism’. My Fair Lady, like Cats for Eliot, has multiplied Shaw’s posthumous worth in ways that it is hard to imagine the author condoning during his lifetime. Shaw’s trustees have marketed the flame very profitably. Holroyd tells the story of the Shavian bequests with ...”

“... will be fundamentally at odds with such an approach. Marcia Pointon is good on the portraits of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkish dress. Hers was an experience oddly complementary to Haydon’s: but what she found was salvation rather than martyrdom through self-mythologising in art. She was a woman for whom some form of public representation was ...”

“... is to tell about a smoker’s life. I was probably five years old when my grandmother’s cleaning lady taught me to draw on a cigarette like a teat, not blow into it like a whistle. Du Maurier was the brand in question. Like Zeno, in Svevo’s book, and most children no doubt, I pinched cigarettes from adults – mainly my grandfather, who smoked ...”

“... whom he laid himself open to the treason charges with which the servants of that most implacable lady, Queen Mary, turned him into a ‘dead Man’ weeks before his execution; and then his two sisters, of whom he chose the Protestant one. The idea of such a choice is a nice conceit, the more so because MacCulloch relates it to a dream which Cranmer is ...”

“... fleshed out with a cast of advertising copywriters’ characters, such as Eileen the dinner lady and Ben the media director – offer much promise of making a serious impression on that. Underlying all the changes that Blair and Mandelson are successfully propelling through the Labour Party is the imperative of ‘modernisation’: the conviction that ...”

“... Eliot, the only females to get into the book are queens. In addition to Isabella we have Our Lady of Loretto. Then there’s physics, who takes over from theology as the queen of the sciences. (Unfair! He also mentions Carson and there’s an unexplained allusion to Anna Bramwell, who is a lively historian of ecology.) Given the very high quality of much ...”

“... Camilla Parker-Bowles. (We are not told if this is a sexual relationship, but no doubt the lady gives good-enough Jung and Van der Post to satisfy the seeking Prince.) All this, according to Morton, has made Diana increasingly her own woman. With the help of astrologers and metaphysically-inclined masseurs she is carving a niche for herself in ...”

“... whose emergent prince was Truman Capote. In Style, Style, Style, beside a drawing of a portly lady in a yellow dress and a pink umbrella and a green fan, it says: ‘Fashion wasn’t what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going.’ And this was the first of Warhol’s very good perceptions: fashion is about event and situation and ...”

“... relation to her political powerlessness. It is unlikely that flowers will be strewn in the path of Lady Thatcher’s coffin, and she was certainly ‘destroyed’, but, unlike Diana, she wielded power and achieved what she wanted. It has been widely argued that Diana’s enormous popularity is a result (perhaps even a cause of) the ‘feminisation’ of our ...”