“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Henry James and Stephen Crane were fresh and sightings of Radclyffe Hall and her friend Una, Lady Troubridge, lent a touch of verisimilitude to the farcical Rye that, passed off as ‘Tilling’, was the abode of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia and ‘Quaint Irene’, the resident Post-Impressionist. Burra thrived on literary and artistic connections ...”

“... Rainy Dawn’ and dated 1945, which struck me then and since as the equal of Chekhov’s ‘Lady with Lapdog’.We are on a Volga steamer. It’s night. The boat puts in for three hours at one of Paustovsky’s tiny nowhere places (what’s the Russian for ‘podunk’?) called Navoloki. Just long enough to allow the central figure, a Major Kuzmin, who ...”

“... experimental novels. Born in 1903 into a well-to-do West Country family, she was a student at Lady Margaret Hall, graduating in 1927. After Oxford, she moved to London, and in 1931 into a flat at 107 Lansdowne Road, Notting Hill. There’s a rare sighting of her, a diminutive figure flanked by solemn men in suits, in a photograph in the March 1933 issue ...”

“... bright’, was brought up an only child in Gloucestershire, the daughter of ‘a real Cheltenham lady’. ‘They were very different people, my parents.’ On holiday in the Pyrenees in 1962 the differences are not on show, except perhaps in his mother’s sideways glance away from the camera. His father, a keen birdwatcher, has his field glasses round his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... go down, talk to the people at the desk about this statement.” So we went down there and this lady, she was at the desk, and I said, “Ma’am, about that diorama about Yosemite,” and she says, “Oh, isn’t that nice?” And I said, “It’s nice, but there’s an error in the statement,” and she says, “Oh no, there can’t be. Every little word ...”

“... Barbara Howard, Countess of Suffolk, who was keeper of Catherine’s privy purse as well as first lady of the bedchamber and groom of the stool. Suffolk was also the Countess of Castlemaine’s aunt, and she and her husband, James Howard, were, in Hayward’s description, a ‘Restoration political and social “power couple”’. It was Suffolk who helped ...”

“... if Larkin’s your man, in 1963 – a year before Top of the Pops – and off the back of the Lady Chatterley trial and the Beatles’ first LP. But the intermediaries, too, were now part of the strange dance of the permissive with the banned. And it became part of their public profile to thrive at the centre of a doubt about acceptability. That might be ...”

“... and ham sandwich. ‘Pretty good,’ he said. Then he leaned over to me, whispering. ‘That lady hates us.’‘Were you busy earlier on?’ I asked her.‘Packed,’ she said. ‘The workers and the schoolkids, just by.’‘Where do the young people go for nights out?’ Karl said.She looked at him as if human nature were always biting at her ...”

“... of the men who did survive were disgraced: Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, husband of the fashion designer Lady Lucile, was said to have resorted to bribery to make it into a lifeboat; Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line, claimed that an officer more or less urged him to take a place – others said he pushed his way in. Neither lived down the fact that ...”

“... of a one-eyed dwarf dressed entirely in pink, or a skull engraved with Old Norse runes sporting a lady barrister’s cap made out of pages … from the Times’. No other art from the same period insists so calmly and completely on its unassimilablity to conventional canons of the normal, the insightful, the informative, or even the sane. Eventually and very ...”

“... in those days. Me, I’d rather be in a dentist’s chair than go to one of those things where the lady poet whispers in her breathless little lady-poet voice about how come she’s so out of sorts and about granny’s mouldering petticoat in the attic, this sort of drivel. But the poet-boy, he’s worse still, striking this ...”

“... all accounts, Rose was difficult to live with (Schwartz’s childhood friends called her Lady Macbeth). Harry often abandoned the family home for periods and in 1923 packed up for good, moving to Chicago. Afterwards, worried that Delmore was becoming a ‘violin’ of his mother’s ‘sick emotions’, he offered to buy his son from Rose for ...”