“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... every paper burnt, and every letter unanswered’. Allusions to James – primarily Portrait of a Lady – and other classic novelists structure the text, and Malcolm, an inveterate mythologiser, also compares Plath to Medea and Medusa; Hughes to Adonis and Prometheus; and Olwyn to Cerberus and the Sphinx. Fairy tales get in there too, especially ...”

“... of a Levantine grocer. In op-ed fable she presented the Windsor family’s lone human face, Avon Lady to the House of Atreus. This wasn’t so long ago, and the Royals’ supposed bounce back to public favour came as a shock to many in the commentariat. They need not have been surprised. Even in December 1997, at the supposed nadir of the Windsor clan’s ...”

“... family. Always, on meeting, he wore a gentle smile that would have flattered a kind old lady, an effect curiously enhanced by his carefully trimmed moustache, less curiously by his lilting manner of speaking which seemed to sing at you – more musically, I always thought, than his singing voice – and all this at the very top of a ...”

“... Than man can bear.’ To which the unsentimental Nubian replies: ‘None can exceed their limit, lady./You either bear or break.’ In the extraordinary poem ‘God Made Blind’, Rosenberg presents a stratagem of ‘God-gulling’: this is a way of cheating God by pretending that we have as much misery as we can bear (so God will lay off before it really is ...”

“... loves watching her, and, just for fun, calls her ‘Colonel Barker’; perhaps she was ‘a lady pilot, a sergeant in the WAAF, something like that: one of those women, in other words, who’d charged about so happily during the war, and then got left over.’ As it happens, Kay spent the war working for the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service, pulling ...”

“... of tuberculosis at the age of 24 but was famously resurrected in the heroines of The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Wings of the Dove (1902), and the American writer, Constance Fenimore Woolson, James’s intermittent companion and occasional fellow lodger for over a decade, who apparently committed suicide by hurling herself from the window of her Venetian ...”

“... mattered, D.H. Lawrence. ‘I don’t in the least want to turn you out of your hut,’ says Lady Chatterley to the gamekeeper. ‘It’s your ladyship’s own ‘ut,’ replies her rough trade, demonstrating by a single apostrophe that real men have no business aping their betters. The movement towards standardisation took off in the second half of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Thereafter, Castlereagh spent a year at Cambridge. Like his father, he married an Anglican, Lady Amelia Hobart, the daughter of the Earl of Buckinghamshire, and worshipped in the Anglican Church. Despite this, Bew shows, he was influenced by the Presbyterian Enlightenment of 18th-century Scotland and its Ulster outposts. The young politician was happily ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... closely connected than to any Plantagenets or Stuarts. ‘Most of their subjects do not know that Lady Diana Spencer (1961-97) was the very first person of primarily English descent who ever came near the British throne in the whole of its 300-year history.’ His view, anyway, is that old ‘Ukania’ is rapidly veering towards history’s landfill. ‘That ...”

“... approaching from a distance, ‘as in this street in Paris’, with ‘a dog and a well-dressed lady standing upright next to a melancholic gentleman’. The way the city had been overwhelmed by the river may well have seemed charming, though only because of the scenes on offer. The sight of the boulevard St Germain transformed at its northern end into a ...”

“... visit was that Lawrence used some details of the family and the estate for his work in progress, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, causing another of Sitwell’s abrupt reversals of opinion. She decided that Lawrence’s poetry was not as she had thought ‘beautiful’ and ‘moving’ and that he himself looked like ‘a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some ...”