“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in some of his as yet unpublished poems, in ‘Preludes’, for example, or ‘Portrait of a Lady’, ‘First Caprice in North Cambridge’, and ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... far fewer imagine themselves as middle-aged. In Britain between the wars a respectable young lady, dependent on her father for an allowance, had limited options. She expected and was expected to marry. A graduate might find professional employment, but the marriage bar stymied careers in many areas, including teaching and the civil service. Marriage ...”

“... with Charles in the hamlet of Huntworth, Somerset, where they could be visited at will by the lady of the manor, who spoke to them without ever ‘removing her gloves’. Free TB treatment had been available since 1921, administered by local authorities, but conditions inside sanatoriums varied and Iris left school to care for her mother. Being a daughter ...”

“... unfortunate Burbage arrived, Shakespeare was already ‘entertained and at his game’ with the lady, and is quoted as having said to his rival ‘William the Conqueror was before Richard III.’By 1600 the status of vernacular authors was high enough for them to be ‘quoted’ in the same way as classical poets, and so nosegays of flowers culled from ...”

“... aspired to present her to Queen Victoria. However, a libel case the couple brought against one of Lady Twiss’s former clients sensationally collapsed and Twiss was forced by the archbishop of Canterbury to disgorge his lucrative ecclesiastical positions. Ruined, he was getting by writing law textbooks when Leopold came calling. In Berlin, Twiss secretly ...”