“... 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 ...”

“... almost always shown fully clothed. Whereas Eve is born in her birthday suit, Pandora, the first lady of the Greeks, comes with a full kit. Dress seems part and parcel of women’s identity. Athena springs out in full regalia and Aphrodite’s girdle seems to contain all her erotic power. To see a goddess naked therefore is an epiphany too far. The very ...”

“... of Jane Seymour with Henry’s hoped-for heir is darkly shadowed by the phantom pregnancy of Lady Lisle, wife of the governor of Calais. An interview with Henry’s daughter Mary, during which Cromwell tries to impress on her the need to obey her father or die resisting him, both of them conscious of the fact that she is of marriageable age and he ...”

“... she affects to know nothing of her husband’s behaviour before and during her stint as First Lady. ‘Mind you,’ she told a local newspaper, ‘they were talking about Sierra Leone. It was not a Liberian issue.’ Lack of accountability, among powerful families, clans, political colleagues and comrades-in-arms, is guaranteed to flourish when we ...”

“... after he was released from prison. ‘Everywhere I go, people are asking about you.’ The first lady, Jeannette Kagame, told Karegeya’s wife that he had only himself to blame. ‘We tried to warn you about Fred Rwigyema and you didn’t listen to us. If my husband wasn’t a tolerant man, you could be dead by now.’He soon was. An inquest in South Africa ...”