“... authority by challenging the central tenet of monotheism itself. Pacelli became a devotee of Our Lady of Fátima and the legends of Fátima and Lourdes bulked far larger in my childhood than anything to do with the Bible – and since these legends depended on visions of the Virgin, it was not long before Pacelli announced that he had been having visions ...”

“... some of them detailing Thackeray’s illicit passion for Mrs Brookfield. His daughter Annie, now Lady Ritchie, did her best to counter this with a series of ‘biographical introductions’ attached to the Centenary Memorial Edition of her father’s work. The paternal prohibition was breached. In 1931, a particularly venomous attack was launched on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I’m not going to stop people writing what they want. I would say, though, that the lady I knew has changed.’ You would think he had learned by now that women can’t be trusted simply to be beloved without spoiling everything by pooing in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”