“... for her to form a hunting party, or rush out and scalp me; though I know she’s a small poor lady, with a piping voice and a bird’s neck. Till someone explains why it’s wrong, I’m sticking by my joke. I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s the only joke I’ve got. I know everything about denominations: church, chapel, various chapels, Protestant ...”

“... bought them and lots of other fabulous items, ready for what she planned to be her UK debut as Lady Lazarus, rising from the wreckage of her family: her stepfather, her mother and her grandmother had all died within a few years. She must have been both liberated and devastated. The important thing, though, was that the deaths had left her rich.Acker’s ...”

“... into the rain. The Tube was crowded at Bank, everyone keeping themselves to themselves, the Indian lady in sandals and socks, the young man with earphones and jagged hair lost in beats not his own; the lady across from me with the Aztec necklace, the man in the North Face jacket, the schoolchild looking out anxiously for her ...”

“... with another woman. No wonder figures like Wyndham Lewis couldn’t take it – the ‘Jewish lady’ was a ‘highbrow clown’. (Antisemitism was an undeniable theme in her reception by the more talented modernists too: in Eliot’s fear of her work instituting a ‘new barbarian age’ or Ezra Pound claiming that ‘Gertie Stein … writes yittish wit ...”

“... lord’, controlling the Express empire, as well as a member of the coalition cabinet. Soon Lady Diana herself would take the Beaver’s shilling and write a column in the Sunday Express until the editor managed to suppress it (‘the veriest twaddle’). This snapshot – one of many in Charles Williams’s biography – reveals two factors in ...”

“... in India Conquered: the Brighton Pavilion was not built by Prince Albert; the viceroy who was Lady Dorothy Macmillan’s grandfather and whose portrait gazed down on Harold Macmillan was Lansdowne, not Dufferin. But in general, Wilson’s thesis stands up to examination, not least to the self-examination of the collectors who sweltered through the hot ...”

“... us right inside one of the rooms in his house, and shows us three men in bed with a light-tailed lady whose services they must surely be paying him for. ‘If it be not a bawd’s house,’ Constable Elbow says, it is certainly ‘a naughty house’. He is talking of Mistress Overdone’s brothel, a place so dodgy that even the irreproachable Mrs Elbow might ...”

“... in John Closterman’s group portrait of the Marlborough family at Blenheim: an aristocratic lady with an authority that comes in part from her willingness to adopt something of the more responsible values of the middling class. Once the Stuarts are dispatched, the story of art that Solkin tells, for the early 18th century, is the story of the relation ...”

“... Paris she returns to America aged 20, an orphaned heiress. Like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (‘as nearly perfect a work as a novel can be,’ Vidal has written), she is determined to be free and to see the world. Hay is a version of Mr Touchett, his son Del the doomed Ralph. Del’s perfunctory demise is something of a joke, but Vidal’s witty ...”

“... AND GOVERNESSES, PARLOURMAIDS AND HOUSE-PARLOURMAIDS, HOUSEMAIDS, MANSERVANTS, GARDENERS, LADY GARDENERS, HOUSEKEEPERS, LADIES’ MAIDS AND MAIDS, BETWEENMAIDS AND GENERALS, MARRIED COUPLES AND MANSERVANTS, CHAUFFEURS, CHAUFFEUSES.11 May 1938: ‘Young, well-educated Viennese Nursery Governess, pleasant appearance, desires post: mother tongue ...”

“... the flight; reassured, protected, in the presence of a monument.At the airport, I text my Lady’s Companion, my friend Hope. ‘Were you joking when you invited me to come with you to Rome?’ she wrote to me tentatively last week. ‘Hoe, I would never joke about needing another lady to help me stay alive.’ She ...”

“... lives run alongside melodramatic fiction. Mary Braddon, for example, best-selling author of Lady Audley’s Secret and a bohemian variant on Jane Eyre, went to live with the publisher John Maxwell, who had ‘five children, and a wife in an Irish lunatic asylum’; after 13 years the wife died and she could at last marry him. It is little wonder that ...”

“... it. It was untraditional, new-fangled and (worst of all) above Gail’s mother’s station. Lady Kenyon (the Kenyons were the other local grandees, a lot richer and more dashing than the Hanmers) might be divorced, and that was fittingly aristocratic; for the local garageowner’s daughter to do it was very different. Who did she think she was? People ...”

“... is a crime in itself. Few expert witnesses experience the luxury enjoyed by Richard Hoggart in the Lady Chatterley trial of being able to defend a considered critical evaluation against a hail of middle-class morality. But it is too late to protest: scientists are now regular foot-soldiers in the army of the law, and the conscripts among them are becoming ...”

“... sexual life other than that he married. And his wife Rose is as elusive a personage as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Super is reduced to dredging up passages from Doctor Thorne and The Eustace Diamonds to evoke what Miss Heseltine might have been like in her lover’s eyes. In these circumstances, An Autobiography is, or should be, a godsend. It contains a ...”