“... their consequences. He did not have to fight for his own interests – his waspish sister-in-law Lady Frances Balfour said: ‘Arthur’s opportunities were all made for him’ – and he found it hard to imagine that those less fortunate would fight for theirs. He told his sister Evelyn Rayleigh that ‘his mind did not naturally turn to politics. He never ...”

“... Fanny’s triumphant debut temporarily rescued the family fortunes. Accompanied by her mother as Lady Capulet and her father as Mercutio, Fanny’s Juliet was an overwhelming, if not quite universal success. But most critics agreed that her performance was more than worthy of her name; and in her first season alone she managed to earn almost triple what her ...”

“... of defence staff, Sir Peter Harding, was having an affair with the very nearly perfectly named Lady Bienvenida Buck. Even amid his rejoicing at the 80,000 extra copies he sold and feeling like ‘I’ve won an Olympic gold medal for gutter journalism or something – utterly, deliciously intoxicating,’ he spares a thought for his victims: ‘I must admit ...”

“... of a tank; that he was suspected of treachery as a result of a letter he received from a lady while he was at Delft – but these details are usually subordinated to, and for most modern readers awkwardly combined with, attempts to allegorise or moralise them. Gascoigne’s account of his experiences in Holland in ‘Dulce Bellum Inexpertis’ is ...”

“... actually – as I don’t think it is in Ashbery and not often in O’Hara, apart from ‘The Day Lady Died’ – responsibility. Where it shows most, and most surprisingly, is in the endings of the poems. Again, this is hard to show by quoting, but time and again a poem that looks to be this, then that, then the other thing, will have a proper ending. A ...”

“... trodden’ on his heart, complaining of ‘giddiness and faintness’ (‘which is so like a fine lady, that I am rather ashamed of the disorder’), and hoping to lose weight, Byron had hired the very young Polidori (who two years earlier had taken his medical degree at Edinburgh, aged 19) to accompany him as his travelling physician. The arrangement lasted ...”

“... liquidation of the Jews in Bolechów some were ‘tortured for 24 hours’. He asked a very old lady in Bolechów what ‘being tortured for 24 hours’ might mean. She told us that the Jews had been herded into the Catholic community centre at the northern edge of the town, and that there the Germans had forced the captive Jews to stand on each other’s ...”

“... seem that the latter is implicit in the former. Who bothers, while teaching The Portrait of a Lady for the nth time, to explain to a class that it is a beautiful book? But it would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that, for most writers, greedy to learn and emulate, this is the only important question. Randall Stevenson’s volume in the Oxford English ...”

“... an editorial entitled ‘A Mess instead of Music’, attacking Shostakovich’s new opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, for its modernist tendencies (known in the Soviet Union as ‘formalism’). Lina was worried, and several of their friends warned them that the anti-formalism campaign was likely to spread. But it was too late to draw back ...”

“... have known: after all, Ethelred married Alfred’s daughter Ethelflæd, who would become ‘the Lady of the Mercians’ and co-operate closely with her brother Edward in the reconquest of the north. But even before that, alderman Ethelred was hand in glove with Alfred. The silence about him is deeply suspicious. Alex Woolf, of St Andrews, has made the ...”

“... a deacon, banging away on a drum set his mother bought him with money she had earned as an Avon lady in town. Otis Redding performing in 1967 Otis was the fourth of six children. The youngest was born in 1955. The projects, which had been new when the Reddings moved in, were already crumbling, and so the family moved, out of the Tindall Heights Homes ...”

“... to us as Fonda is in 12 Angry Men? Could he have played the chump in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve without angling for sympathy? There has always been a strain of American acting that is resolute, simple and content to trust a known self. You can see it in some of Brando’s contemporaries – Robert Mitchum, William Holden, Glenn Ford or, coming up ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”