“... 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 ...”

“... of Australian Red and Philadelphia Slim for that of Sickert, Balfour, Conrad, Epstein, Huxley, Lady Cunard and Augustus John. In Later Days he portrays himself as a shy outsider among metropolitan bigwigs, afraid of being exposed as a fraud. Patronised as a peasant innocent, aka the Tramp Poet (a title even the British Museum Reading Room catalogue used ...”

“... of fabled enchanter. The coif fell off, and the false plaits. The laboured illusion vanished. The lady who had knelt before the block was in the maturity of grace and loveliness. The executioner, when he raised the head, as usual, to show it to the crowd, exposed the withered features of a grizzled, wrinkled old woman. This account of the execution of Mary ...”

“... Princesses for that matter, rather than figments of sheer fancy. Ceres, he explained, was a fine lady who sailed from Sicily to Greece in 1030 BC, and taught the natives to cultivate corn – ‘for which Benefaction,’ Newton says, ‘she was Deified after death.’ In the following generation we might note the clean-limbed Apollo, whose admirers included ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that was totally relaxed about people who become filthy rich; they are now Sir Harold Evans and Lady Evans CBE. Even in his eighties, Harry hankers after public life, although his recent interventions have not been happy, including his latest effusion in the Guardian, in which he insisted that ‘Israel is not an “occupying power” in Gaza,’ even if ...”

“... Franklin in 1848; the hunt for him, thanks in no small part to the tireless lobbying of his widow, Lady Jane, soon came to supplant the search for the northwest passage as the primary purpose of voyages to the Arctic. Lambert argues, fairly convincingly, that by the time of Franklin’s voyage the search for the passage was itself a crowd-pleasing pretext, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it was easy enough for Manning to take in a CD with a scrawled inscription in felt tip – ‘Lady Gaga’ did the trick – wipe the contents and ‘then write a compressed split file … nobody suspected a thing.’ A former FOB Hammer security staffer explained how easy it could be: ‘There were laptops sitting there with passwords on sticky notes. If ...”