“... 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 ...”

“... tacit understanding was that Chekhov might have girlfriends to stay, but Masha was to remain the lady of the house. Those that accepted these rules could retain the friendship of both brother and sister: Olga Kundasova, the radical feminist ‘astronomer’, lasted, first as mistress, then as psychiatric patient, finally as friend, for twenty years. Even ...”

“... off.’ Long before he was demonised by the Victorians, the inventor of the Yahoos and ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ was shown as a self-destroying misanthrope. As Glendinning says, Swift’s death ‘unleashed a spate of speculation and analysis which continues to this day’. Much of it has not been charitable. One of the best things about ...”

“... cry of pain at the news of her engagement. Hardly less intriguing are the numerous letters to Lady Louisa de Rothschild, an attractive, bookish (and very rich) woman who shared his intellectual interests far more than his wife did. Characteristic of this relationship is the letter in which he reports how the irreverent preface to his Essays in Criticism ...”

“... liked were Jebb the public orator and Mrs Jebb,’ he wrote later: ‘but Mrs Jebb is an American lady and so is naturally unlike Cambridge and indeed thoroughly charming.’ In the first version of his book, published in 1951, Lord Annan obviously thought it sensible of Stephen to get out: ‘most young dons who tear themselves away from the numbing embrace ...”

“... her widespread popularity as well as much-needed cash. When the sketches had first appeared in the Lady’s Magazine of 1819, sales of the periodical had multiplied eightfold, and five volumes in the series had been published in the intervening years. The bulk of Mitford’s earnings as a writer were rapidly squandered by her dreadful father – that ...”

“... his first wife. It would have been good to read about Godwin’s first meeting with that lady if the account had not been misprinted thus: ‘When he lauded Horne Tooke, Dr Johnson and Voltaire, she declared prescription, prejudice, and the British Constitution. Like that such lavish praise disagreed on religion: Godwin was a sceptical ...”

“... novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither ...”