“... excited by the ‘children in rags, the scabies, the ringworm, the lepers’. Shelley’s friend Lady Blessington, who was rather shrewder, recognised the element of showmanship in this ‘hyperbolical’ performance to a captive audience, most of whom had little means of knowing what they should pay or whose services they might best employ.The hermitage was ...”

“... insistence on an eastern orientation and the nature of the site they had acquired from Lady Russell (the Bedford family owned much of Bloomsbury). It was quite small, already surrounded by houses, and longer from north to south than from east to west. James Gibbs, one of the surveyors appointed by the Commissioners (Hawksmoor was the ...”

“... an Irishwoman for whom the house and its lands were nonetheless a ‘sacred trust’. The same lady strongly believed that the English deserved to lose the war, for theirs was not a Christian cause. So who were the real patriots? And for what?Such snapshots of discordant individuals are refreshing because more academic studies of patriotism and nationalism ...”

“... was comparable to that of Shakespeare and Spinoza (though probably more as foil than as model). Lady Anne Monson, the British botanist of Indian plants, toasted Linnaeus as ‘king of all the realms of nature’ before raising her glass to George III, who was king merely of Britain and Ireland.Until his eyesight failed him in old age, he prided himself on ...”

“... had made clumsy efforts to get the Times to replace Ebbutt as its correspondent by suggesting to Lady Astor, whose family owned the paper, that he was a drunk. In power, they switched to more direct methods. Returning home from a restaurant late one night, Ebbutt saw armed police running into the building with rifles at the ready; moments later ‘the ...”

“... respect’ owed by the courts to the executive and legislature was another favourite formula. Lady Hale wrote in 2008 that ‘the doctrine of the “margin of appreciation” as applied in Strasbourg has no application in domestic law.’ One of her colleagues, Lord Mance, saw it as merely a ‘principle which distributes responsibility between the ...”

“... usage. Sometimes that sexism becomes explicit, as when Alexander Pope begins his ‘Epistle to a Lady on the Characters of Women’ with ‘Nothing so true as what you once let fall:/“Most Women have no Characters at all.”’ In that couplet Pope was responding to a long-standing tradition that linked character with maleness. When sometime around 320 ...”

“... in some of his as yet unpublished poems, in ‘Preludes’, for example, or ‘Portrait of a Lady’, ‘First Caprice in North Cambridge’, and ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. He had decided he must stay in London, there to launch his career as a poet. This was the course recommended by his new friend and admirer Ezra Pound, to whom he had ...”

“... crowded aircraft cabin, his hand raised and his face as sombre as it is possible to imagine, with Lady Bird on one side and Jackie, still in her blood-stained coat, on the other, the tiny figure in front holding the Bible is Sarah Hughes. Johnson choreographed every aspect of the picture. It sent out all the signals he wanted to ...”

“... responded by sending in an astonishing £25,000.’ There were messages of endorsement from Lady Antonia Fraser and the feisty historian Andrew Roberts; the Economist saluted the new edition as ‘impeccably postmodern’; 5000 free copies were distributed to schools, a Trojan horse for early indoctrination in traditional values that would be reinforced ...”

“... in my first play, Forty Years On. It was a parody of Oscar Wilde. I was in drag as a putative Lady Bracknell and wheeled by John Gielgud. ‘I can walk,’ I said, ‘only I’m so rich I don’t need to.’20 July. Another hot day, too hot to be out of doors, until lying on the sofa trying to work in the late afternoon, I hear the rustle of rain. In one ...”

“... visits Moscow, and sees Tatiana at a ball. No longer the bucolic ingénue, she is now a society lady, married to a general. ‘How well she’d studied her new role!’ He, quite unexpectedly, falls in love with her, only to be rejected. She admits to a strong residual passion for him, and tells him that she would happily give up this ‘tinsel ...”

“... told one of the Abuelas that they reminded her of Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities, the old lady who sits and knits while the French Revolution rages, a list of targets to be guillotined concealed in her long scarf.A narrative history like this book, focused on a few exemplary figures, is vivid and easy to grasp. You can imagine yourself in the ...”

“... beyond himself. He was able to draw performances of a brave originality from Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth and Mac Liammóir as Iago. The voice of Nolan ascends to shouts that are an audible grimace and cries of forgetting that are nothing like innocence. Mac Liammóir’s Iago has a wider field to achieve his effects, and his walk is itself an essay in ...”

“... by distinguished-looking foreign gentlemen – Nabokov, Calvino – rather than a scruffy young lady in a combat jacket with a curly Jimi Hendrix crop. But the world caught up with her in the 1970s with the spread of women’s liberation and the founding in Britain of the feminist Virago Press. Carter was one of the first authors Virago recruited to its ...”