“... 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 ...”

“... speculate about the future life her erstwhile fiancé might enjoy without her, with a ‘radiant lady with droves of bullocks on the plains of Meath’. And when father and son depart to make their living out of tale-telling, Pegeen Mike is already structuring a tragic model of the events and their protagonist: ‘Oh, my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve ...”

“... which her childhood has kept her for much of her adulthood, by repeatedly invoking Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shallot’. Only in writing her book, she intimates, has she finally escaped the ‘four gray walls and four gray towers’ of parental oppression. It is one of the cast-iron rules of biographical writing: the more damaging and transgressive the ...”

“... apple crate, sweating in a black suit, who began pleading to his brothers and sisters; an old bag-lady retrieving a carnation from a bin to put in her hair.’ There are always things to be noticed, things that stand out: Smith doesn’t invariably look for them. Sometimes, though, the writing works beautifully. There’s a scene in which Alsana, Clara and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... art. In the era of Sir Giles, a dash of Spanish Gothic entered the equation, as in his exquisite Lady Chapel at Liverpool Cathedral. These things go unnoticed, however, because foreign motifs were blended into the later churches of the Gothic Revival without the ostentation of the mid-Victorians. The third of Scott’s major churches is a disappointment. In ...”

“... Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. She looked back over her shoulder, laughing with the jolly tea-lady, as she scooshed the big syringe. Attend! I wanted to say to her, though she hardly needed to. Here, I’ll do it. I’ll kill the infection. I’ll do it with attention. Prayerfully, if you like. The bed where the woman had read her paperback and the man ...”

“... diary was his rash marriage to his penniless French wife, Elizabeth. His amicable intimacy with Lady Sandwich is also described delicately and tactfully, as is the comfortable expediency of his erotic relations with the loose-living Betty Lane and her sister Doll. Tomalin conveys too, as no previous biographer has done, the resilience and the spirit of the ...”

“... Evans, not yet George Eliot, wrote a piece in the Westminster Review called ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’. She exempted three women from her criticism – ‘Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell and Mrs Gaskell’ – whose excellence results in their having ‘been treated as cavalierly as if they were men’. Today the exceptional trio would read ...”

“... liberated, Peggy has discovered reading and been much disappointed by the end of The Portrait of a Lady, but all the adventures and annoyances have quietened now, and everyone is amused and in good humour. James says: ‘This was my mother’s dream for us.’ ‘That we would end up in England?’ William asks. ‘No,’ Henry says, smiling. ‘She always ...”

“... hard-pressed secretaries, who found that Rathbone expected others to work as hard as she did, ‘Lady Astor dictates her letters through the lavatory door.’ Pedersen’s grasp of the Liverpool background seems a little unsure. England possessed no tougher, more violent or more polyglot city, torn by riots and by sectarian tensions. As it became polarised ...”

“... and a woman receiving guests. ‘Go on, my lord and nephew,’ the uncle told him. ‘Kiss this lady, she is your mother.’ With the army ruled out, Talleyrand instead headed into the Church. At the seminary of Saint-Sulpice he paid little attention to his studies, preferring to major in seditious literature and minor in actresses, but these choices proved ...”

“... Valentinian presented him with something much better: the signet ring of a princess, sent by the lady herself. Apart perhaps from his meeting with Pope Leo, this is by far the most romanticised episode of Attila’s career. It is hard to resist the image of the princess in the tower, pining for her barbarian saviour, but the reality is rather different. The ...”

“... in those days, you’d neighbours in your houses helping.’ Furthermore, ‘every street had its lady,’ an experienced older married woman or widow who was routinely called on in times of illness or need. These ‘neighbourhood health authorities’, as Beier calls them, would do anything from delivering babies to laying out the dead, and were the ...”

“... the supreme being by name. In Alan Clark’s diaries, Margaret Thatcher was invariably ‘The Lady’. Mullin, who on this evidence harbours fewer illusions about high office than most ex-ministers, refers to Blair simply as ‘The Man’, ‘Himself’, or even, on one or two surreal occasions, as ‘The Presence’. Whether Blair’s kenning takes the ...”