“... Nancy was an only child, and when her parents separated she moved with her mother to London, where Lady Emerald Cunard, as Maud later styled herself, became a leading literary socialite. It is one thing to be bored by steamers and convoys and trains; another to be bored because one’s father owns them. What things ‘mean to’ Cunard is the question that ...”

“... A startling print by Caspar von Regensburg, c.1485, portrays the Venus-like figure of Frau Minne (Lady Love) as a nude dominatrix trampling on a hapless lover’s heart. With her right hand she impales another heart on a spear, while her left pierces one with a sword. Surrounding the goddess, 16 more hearts are roasted in flames, guillotined, crushed in a ...”

“... liked the safety of home environments, not foreign ones, and couldn’t wait ‘to be a grown-up lady at home all the time’. She takes us on her ‘house extension journey’ and it’s totes emosh and some people get jels. She was seriously overweight at one time but has lost eight stone since 2011 wearing a gastric band. ‘I’m not expecting people to ...”

“... 1930s the war remained, for all its horror, a boon. E.M. Delafield, whose ‘Diary of a Provincial Lady’ in Time and Tide offered readers the agonised thoughts of Bridget Jones’s great-aunt, remembered it as ‘pure liberation’. The overthrow of the awful Edwardians, the triumph of Bloomsbury over the Kensington of Leslie Stephen, were unmitigated ...”

“... contrition! We are druv’ to it. John Bull will have it so. Tu l’as voulu John Dandin! And his lady still more! Let us toe the line, my brothers, and invest with care. Londres vaut bien une messe.’ Then catch at your own coat-tails. ‘An unpardonable digression! I am like a bus driver who is perpetually jumping down to fight some passer-by. I apologise ...”

“... The story opens on a picture of a very large young lady, ‘a truly massive young person’, crossing from one house to another in Newport, Rhode Island, site of ‘florid’ villas and other structures ‘smothered in senseless architectural ornament’. On the verandah of the second house she finds her father, an inordinately rich man, sourly awaiting the death of his former partner, a slightly less rich man ...”

“... the eponymous slow man, and an ‘author’, who is, once again, Coetzee’s Australian ‘lady novelist’, the redoubtable Elizabeth Costello. Yet this is Foe with a difference. Though the gender reversal is important – Foe is in part about a woman struggling against the suasive powers of a male author – more emphasis is placed on what the two ...”

“... question of Pincher’s timing. He began work in December, having previously been writing, with Lady Falkender, a book called The Infiltrators. Planned originally for April, the launch was brought forward so that it appeared in the Daily Mail for four successive days preceding the launch of the Social Democrats on 26 March. The new party was launched in the ...”

“... movie still of Greta Garbo in The Kiss. The major turning-point is Romney’s ‘Portrait of Lady Hamilton as Circe’. His sexual infatuation with his model is so intense and palpable as to define a tradition that continues unbroken down to the latest Playboy centrefold: the loosened hair, the eyes set in a lustful stare, the half-open rosebud ...”

“... Russell in his autobiography gives no casus belli, but there was disharmony from the start between Lady Russell and Barnes, who liked to instruct her on how to bring up her three-year-old child. The unforeseeable tipping point turned out to be her habit of knitting (for the allied troops) during her husband’s lectures. She received an official reprimand from ...”

“... of pain about the postwar decline of ‘civilisation’ in a country where ‘the more one’s a lady or a gentleman the less chance one has.’Both radical hopes and reactionary fears were confounded by events, and the differences between Labour and Tory were often narrower than they seemed at the time. The Attlee government created the NHS, but Churchill ...”

“... set during the First World War, the other a comedy thriller in the manner of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. But both are elevated by the light, ironic style of Pressburger’s script and by the hulking presence of Conrad Veidt, another exile from the Nazis, who had appeared in German silent movies. (Veidt wasn’t Jewish but, as Caitlin McDonald writes ...”

“... despite being entirely Californian. (She picked it up after watching Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.) After seeing Pierce Brosnan play a proto-Bond in the TV show Remington Steele, Newsom became ‘obsessed with Steele’ – so confident, so smooth – and started to copy his mannerisms, ‘the wrinkling of his brow being the first’, becoming the only ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... she did or did not want to do. She wanted to abolish poverty: but she did not want to play the Lady Bountiful distributing charity, nor was she willing to adopt the harsh distinction that the Charity Organisation Society drew between the deserving and the undeserving poor. She was profoundly convinced that poverty and miserable social conditions were the ...”