“... Asquith said irritably that the Liberal press was written ‘by boobies for boobies’. Lady Lilias Margaret Bathurst, proprietor of the Morning Post, told her editor that ‘the public are marvellously ignorant and will swallow anything.’ The outbreak of war accelerated the breakup of old relationships and patterns of press behaviour. On the one ...”

“... social work, he seemed able to enjoy his practice: A busload arrived and I was called to this old lady who’d fainted. When I got there I found she was dead. The trouble with this town is there’s no mortuary. I knew it would upset them all if I said she was dead. I got them to strap her into the passenger seat next to me. Her son in the back (I told ...”

“... biography, I should imagine, where the word ‘must’ is always a giveaway (‘To the young Lady Venetia, the dashing young consul from Corsica must have seemed a wildly romantic figure’). Very Jean-Paul Sartre, very Mills and Boon. Of course, to say that swathes of L’Idiot are fiction is not to deny them the possibility of truth. Nor, on the other ...”

“... She may have been rich but she wasn’t laid back. Her mother was strict, a ‘Southern lady of the old school’, and the girls (five of them) didn’t smoke, drink, take drugs or ‘go out anywhere’ in jeans. Her father taught her how to use a gun. She trusted her parents and they trusted her. When some teachers found fault with her she refused ...”

“... spree on the tables at Baden seems to have been prompted by reluctance to go on to meet his lady friend in Paris. This was Apollinaria Suslova, usually cast by biographers as the Dostoevskian ‘infernal woman’ premier grade, model for his diabolical heroines and source of many of his woes. In Frank’s presentation she becomes a rather ordinary ...”

“... elaborate conversational manoeuvre designed to trick Lord Raw-don, an aristocratic kinsman of the lady, into acknowledging a family connection with her. He was very pleased with his ‘great address’ and the fact that it ‘had a fine effect’ when he told her about it. A day or two later, however, he was less successful, ‘raving’ about M.C. to a Mrs ...”

“... due measure, just measure. Double standards were no standards at all. The scales held by Lady Justice on top of the Old Bailey express both unbiased scales and an unbiased weigher. (This Justice, atypically, is not blindfolded because she is taken to personify fairness.) God kept weights and measures in his bag, but in human society the objects ...”

“... broke down altogether when I entered the lofty gallery where the blessed goddess of beauty, Our Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. I lay prostrate at her feet for a long time, and I wept so bitterly that it would have melted a heart of stone. And indeed the goddess did look down pitifully upon me, yet at the same time so hopelessly as if she were trying ...”

“... at her departure. Chalked up on a wall in Derry is the possibly ambivalent ‘Iron Lady, rust in peace.’ This paper was born at the time, 1979, when she became prime minister, having won her election as Tory leader, a post she’d gained over the dead bodies of many of the party’s wise heads. It did not take very long to see that papers of ...”

“... Greenmantle Hannay, in his early forties, admits that he has ‘never been in a motor car with a lady before’. ‘I am glad you think I am better at love-making,’ Buchan wrote in a letter to Gilbert Murray. ‘I hate the stuff. I sit and blush with disgust when I am writing it.’ So flirtation and sexual tension were largely off the table as a means of ...”

“... half-forgotten fairy tales and the woeful background drone of the radio news. As a ‘nice lady’ at one point says, trying to put this local horror into perspective, a child goes missing somewhere in this country every three minutes – a figure which may to a rational mind sound like a total fabrication but which feels real to an unconscious ...”

“... degree of choice for most aspiring politicians. He was a member of an unfashionable college – Lady Margaret Hall – rather than one of the prestigious old foundations like Balliol or Christ Church, but through sheer ability and a good deal of networking, including the assiduous cultivation of Johnson, he managed to become president of the Oxford ...”

“... was legendary. She refused to visit her most loyal courtiers when they were dying. One old lady in waiting is said to have actually died at Clarence House, just before one of the queen mother’s famous lunches under the cedar tree in the garden. Her body was shunted into a side room and HM was not informed until the lunch was over, so as not to spoil ...”

“... seeming inability to cast the female lead. ‘I hear you’re having a problem with the leading lady,’ Cohn is supposed to have said to Ray. ‘I don’t have a problem,’ Ray said. ‘I just don’t want Ginger Rogers.’ (He meant the real Ginger Rogers, who was on offer, though it might as well be a catch-all term for the opposite of a femme ...”

“... Gonzago’s wife has vowed that if her husband dies she will never remarry, with the words ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks,’ she is ‘nonplussed, and shows no sign of recognising the likeness of herself in the Player Queen’. I have never yet seen a Gertrude this stupid in performance; more often her reply is played as a defiant ...”