“... Parliament. Johnson, if he has a working majority, will have less need to bypass Parliament. So Lady Hale, or her successor, can do her worst, and he will probably be fine with it, as he was ultimately fine with her doing her worst last time round. It is a Corbyn minority government that will feel the pinch of Johnson’s botched prorogation. Second, a ...”

“... Gentleman was mightily afraid of a cat: I told him it was a Sign he was Pus-ilanimous, and Lady Berkeley talking to her Cat, My Lord said she was very impertinent, but … I thought her Ladyship spoke very much to the poor-pus.’Sometimes an old joke can continue to make sense without much explanation, but occasionally further context is needed. It is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in line 11. Elsewhere, she points out various numerological moments (the total of the ‘dark lady’ sonnets is 28, which reflects male disgust with the lunar, menstrual, cycle alluded to in their number, and I would guess that the number 33 is chosen as a trinal number which picks up the reference to ‘heaven’s sun’ – i.e. Christ. Vendler ...”

“... contribution brief: he had not sold God short and even allowing for the saxophone solo and the old lady currently in full, if tiny, voice it had never ceased to be a church service. Treacher had come along hoping to find Father Jolliffe a bit of a clown and over-anxious to please. There had been no evidence of that and he deserved credit. Canon Treacher folded ...”

“... miner, now the Labour councillor for East Worksop on Bassetlaw District Council, and a dinner lady at a Worksop school, Entwistle was intelligent, well-mannered and conformable. The family were said to keep themselves very much to themselves. As such dull but clever children do, Neil shone at school: his teachers at Valley Comprehensive remembered him as ...”

“... she would pull the cords and the cloth would slide back from these paintings and there they were: Lady Una Troubridge with a monocle in her eye; Radclyffe Hall in a marvellous hunting outfit with a terrific hunting hat. It was the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts.Barney walked round the room telling Capote ...”

“... hand, he probably had a clear picture of the framed magazine picture on Gregor’s wall (‘a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer’) and the ‘cool, leather sofa’ and the cigarettes and the textile samples. No matter how you showed the ...”

“... Chelsea Flower Show, the Mail on Sunday ran an interview under the headline: ‘Parents Reveal how Lady Black’s Greed Drove Her’. Her mother and stepfather are nevertheless excused as media ‘innocents’ and are among the small number of the forgiven. Amiel’s book also does a disservice to her as a journalist whose ‘political stuff’ on abortion ...”