“... Mrs C. came in with her niece this morning and kissed me on the cheek! She is an elderly lady whom I first saw three months ago, one of the old and vulnerable whom the war has tipped back into illness. From what I could piece together she had had a manic episode ten years ago followed by a bout of depression. On her first visit to me she was not ...”

“... about breast-feeding. When David Copperfield is introduced to Mrs Micawber, ‘a thin and faded lady, not at all young’, she is ‘sitting in the parlour ... with a baby at her breast’. ‘This baby was one of twins; and I may remark here that I hardly ever, in all my experience of the family, saw both the twins detached from Mrs Micawber at the same ...”

“... Kensington; the waiting room with its easy chairs, where the only reading matter provided was the Lady; and his consulting room, which was also his study, with its glass-fronted book cases, wall-to-wall Freud. The doctor himself was reassuring, silver-haired, puffing at his pipe, tamping the tobacco down with a metal spatula and peering over the end of his ...”

“... strange. Shaftesbury might want to extract philosophy from where ‘we have immur’d her (poor Lady!) in Colleges and Cells,’ but Philocles’ attainment of wisdom as he listens to Theocles celebrating the order of Nature could only take place in some philosophical arcadia. He is most often encountered ‘roving in the Fields’ with a copy of Virgil ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... evicted by its new owners. The contents of her pantry below her on the steps, she looks like a bag lady. But that was not the end of the Joséphine Baker story. She returned to the Paris stage for the 50th anniversary of La Revue nègre in 1975 and died later that year at 68 after the second performance of her acclaimed show Joséphine. It was a triumphant ...”

“... sighs, and the show goes ahead. What he made of the obscenely gross, nude Rhine-daughters or bag-lady Norns is not hard to guess. Before that, in his first Ring, he had endured Yuri Lubimov’s crass Rheingold (Lubimov had been Haitink’s own choice) and, when that was wisely aborted by Isaacs, the claustrophobic vision, inspired by the Washington ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in 1936, where he confused his superiors with extravagant suggestions for adaptations – Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Rabelais. From there his progress was meteoric. When he decided to get married, he fixed on Cleo, a pretty waitress at an all-night restaurant, and courted her every night for about a year; he also hired private detectives to ...”

“... of playing the courtier, pursuing the politics of intervention through his courtly masque, The Lady of May, he found a country bolt-hole and even a Cave of Adullam at Wilton, the new home of his sister Mary, who had married the Earl of Pembroke. The frustration felt by a young man whose thwarted thirst for virtuous action could easily turn to undisciplined ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”