“... 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 ...”

“... the road), the mild threat of the band of teenagers gathered there from dusk, ‘Jeanine, the old lady who lives across from the bus stop’, the church square, the muddy paths that lead out of the village into the vast fields of wheat and rape beyond, the impoverished households as well as the more middle-class ones, the factory on the edge of the village ...”

“... by his marriage to a non-Jewish woman, found Jalowicz a place to stay with his former cleaning lady. Ida Kahnke, who worked as a toilet attendant, was pleased to have the ten marks Schindler paid her to put up Jalowicz, and it was at her house that Jalowicz met Mitko, the Bulgarian. She soon moved on to lodge with a Frau Schulz, who realised that Jalowicz ...”

“... She created the famous iridescent gown, covered in beetle wings, in which Ellen Terry played Lady Macbeth and in which Sargent painted her in 1889. The picture, ‘the sensation of the year’ according to Terry’s diary, shows her snakelike in her glistening robe holding the crown of Scotland above her head, an embodiment of dangerous female ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for your eastern hostage, extol in basalt Your father, praise with white festoons the goddess your lady; And for your death which will be mine prepare An encasement as if of solid blood.Whether or not such buildings and monuments end up being commissioned and built, the speaker is able to present his identity and art as inextricably intertwined with the family ...”

“... North African ancestry seem to have lived in York, including a woman now known as Ivory Bangle Lady, who was buried in a sarcophagus together with bangles made of Whitby jet and African ivory. The remains of a nearly complete skeleton found in a box labelled ‘Beachy Head’ in Eastbourne Museum were recently identified as belonging to a woman from ...”

“... moral cowardice,’ Searls writes, but it’s such a good story: more true than real, like Lady Macbeth. The stories about the Rorschach getting it right are almost invariably about disturbed people caught out by the test, only extremely rarely about a healthy person being exonerated. There’s a reason for this: in the 1980s, a group of psychologists ...”