“... as an old man forgetting that hip talk has changed somewhat since 1968 (equivalent to the 1960 Lady Chatterley moment: ‘Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?’). He knows that feminists were dismayed by their lyrics: ‘We always like to piss them off. Where would you be without us?’ As a matter of fact, he was doing us bitches a ...”

“... magazines found they had to make compromises. Many, of course, were supported by wealthy patrons: Lady Rothermere, the wife of the press baron Harold Harmsworth, funded T.S. Eliot’s Criterion from 1922 to 1927; the shipping heiress Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) bankrolled both Desmond MacCarthy’s Life and Letters, a Bloomsbury outlet, and her own film ...”

“... facial similarity between the two: how can the woman who helped invent punk look so like the Iron Lady? But for Westwood herself, it wasn’t a stretch. All she had to do was ‘put a little doubt’ in her eyes and she looked just like Thatcher. It’s worth dwelling on the implications of this statement: the real Vivienne Westwood looks like a less ...”

“... served it with her own hands. While the hot water was hauled up from the kitchen by a servant, the lady of the house opened up the locked tea caddy with a key kept on her chatelaine ring; she put the leaves into the fashionably decorated porcelain or precious silver teapot; and she decanted the brewed tea into her guests’ (originally handle-less) porcelain ...”

“... H.G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb), trade-unionists, bankers and that uncategorisable original, Lady Astor. ‘An ambassador without excellent personal contacts is not worthy of the name,’ Maisky wrote to Fedor Gusev, one of the ‘new men’ who came into the Soviet diplomatic service after the Great Purges. It was important not only to know people but ...”

“... by the way,’ they say, ‘if you want to try some trick, don’t try that Smith trick. Because lady, you are deeply unconvincing.’I start gathering my things together. The un-bags. My coat. The rodent says: ‘Given up then? Younger generation. No stamina!’ He’s jeering at me. ‘Here.’ He holds out the raggedy newspaper. ‘Take your quick ...”

“... and, let’s face it, I wasn’t knitting socks for our boys at the front. Wherever that was. The lady chaplain came round, but I said she’d do better praying for God himself; he had after all, caused all the trouble. One crap in the world and it was time to clear up the fucking mess he’d made of it. We were at least owed an apology. Mostly I wrote ...”

“... She asked Sheena ‘when it first occurred to her that she could wind up as the nation’s first lady’; Sheena said she’d never thought about it before – ‘“Not until this very moment,” she says, blinking rapidly.’ The reporter didn’t believe her. Sheena joined Eric’s Mission for Missouri bus tour, usually holding their new ...”

“... or three degrees of separation from anyone he wanted to know. His first trip was made possible by Lady Norton, wife of the British ambassador to Greece, whom Craxton met at an exhibition opening in Zurich. On hearing that he wanted to go to Athens, she mentioned that she had left a ‘borrowed bomber’ in Milan after a trip to get new curtains for the ...”

“... for female artists seeking a way into the canon. It was only in the late 19th century that ‘lady’ students were admitted to life drawing classes at the Royal Academy, and even then the models had to be partially clothed. To exclude women from these classes was to deny them the possibility of painting ambitious works (Nochlin compared it to a medical ...”

“... committee to publish evidence it had been warned might breach a court order imposed by Lady Dorrian, the trial judge, to protect the complainers’ anonymity.When Dorrian refused its requests to alter her order, merely adding a clause to reinforce its existing scope, the Spectator nevertheless declared it a victory. When the Scottish Parliamentary ...”

“... learning’) and then her engagement with various progressive causes that turned her ‘from Tory lady to socialist firebrand’ – an evolution that, remarkably, seems not to have troubled her husband. Janet’s life sounds a new register, with an abortion and a first child out of wedlock followed by a brief companionate marriage, a second child and a ...”

“... too. When, in the Soviet Union in early 1930s, she was forced to entertain George Bernard Shaw and Lady Astor on a visit, she wore her oldest dress, claimed to have no sugar in the house for tea, and was straight-out rude to Shaw when, rattled by her evident hostility, he expressed the hope that Lenin had left her well provided for. To be sure, Krupskaya ...”

“... multiplied and developed. In 1914, Zinaida Poliakova (now Gubbay) was a well-established society lady in Paris. Yet she assumed an important leadership role during the First World War, when she initiated the Society to Aid Jewish Victims of War and became its first president. Nor should we be surprised to find the playboy-businessman Victor Sassoon working ...”

“... and his biological father, Bobby Lipman (who killed a young woman while tripping); Ruth, Lady Fermoy; Major Ron Ferguson’s loyalty to the Wigmore Club (a massage parlour); the queen mother’s lodged fishbone; James Hewitt; Kate’s wife-attacking Uncle Gary; Beatrice and Eugenie and their fascinators; Charles’s ex, Whiplash Wallace; William’s ...”