“... 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 ...”

“... tells him, ‘I love you more and more every day,’ she can write that Kinnaird ‘told Shelley lady Byron usually called your Wife was in good health and on a visit to Mrs Leigh’. Since Claire knew quite well (he had told her) of Byron’s incestuous passion for his half-sister Augusta Leigh, that sentence is surely a nicely-judged double blow. A few ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a number of Pakistani historians) who allege that Nehru’s intimacy with Lady Mountbatten helped India get a better deal than it deserved when the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 are way off the mark. Credit for that must go to the weak-kneed leaders of the Muslim League. The task facing the first post-independence government was ...”

“... Almighty when rebuking his son, but even the plain-spoken Hotspur, the man who complains that his lady swears ‘like a comfit-maker’s wife’ and ought to use ‘a good mouth-filling oath’, cannot declare ‘By God, I cannot flatter.’ This feature may improve this edition’s chances of becoming the set text at small Baptist colleges in the Bible Belt ...”

“... produced surprises. Not everyone had known that there were quite so many images of a huge, winged lady Dawn raping ephebes, but here they were, page after page of them, or that Sisyphus had been mysteriously involved with Odysseus’ mother, that the first bird to abduct Ganymede was not an eagle but a swan, or that beloved Iolaus was also popular in ...”

“... refused to pursue it in the way they wanted, by doing ‘something else outrageous’, to use Lady Ottoline’s phrase. On the contrary, with apparent meekness he agreed to be classified as unfit and sent to Craiglockhart Hospital, where he had his famous meetings with Owen and with the man who was to be his new guru, the psychiatrist ...”

“... of Churchill’s inner circle, Action This Day, which in her first edition (but not the second) Lady Soames said was written at Clementine’s express wish. The first third of Moran’s book has now been reprinted as Churchill at War, 1940-45, with some additional material from his papers and a new introduction by his son John. As his son ...”

“... and don’t bend themselves up at each end as common seals do. ‘Like black bananas,’ the B&B lady had said on Berneray, the night before we sailed. A stone caught my eye, and I bent to pick it up. It was a perfect sphere of white quartz that fitted the palm of my hand, an orb. I’ll keep that, I thought, and, in the moment it had taken me to admire it ...”

“... callous behaviour of the river party that had left Denis Anson to drown. The party had included Lady Diana Manners (later to marry Duff Cooper) and Margot’s stepson and daughter-in-law, Raymond and Katharine Asquith. Two years later, when Violet and her husband ‘Bongie’ Bonham Carter were laughing about Lloyd George’s behaviour, Margot was reminded ...”

“... bring with him five or six horses loaden with sacks as the farmers bring their corn; and when his lady comes in her coach to our shops, it must be followed by a car loaden with Mr. wood’s money … But what the bankers will do I cannot tell. For I am assured, that some great bankers keep by them forty thousand pounds in ready cash to answer all ...”

“... is that Britten had the last laugh. In the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, I once observed an old lady, buried in furs and hung about with priceless jewellery, peer impassively through a lorgnette at Egon Schiele’s drawings of women masturbating. The rituals of the Aldeburgh festival played out a similar game of double standards. It is a game, perhaps, that ...”

“... described in James’s novels. It is to her that he recounts such triumphs as a ‘few days with Lady Low’ in Dorset, for, proud of her pedigree as a Wadsworth, and a distant connection to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Isabel harboured hopes that her gifted son might restore some of the ancestral respectability squandered by her wastrel father, whose ...”

“... and felt mildly ashamed of this, guilty that I couldn’t always remember which elderly lady was which. Then I realised that I wasn’t necessarily imposing my own priorities. If the mechanism of making art is the same as the mechanism of dreaming, then the primary processes are displacement and condensation – and perhaps Philip Hensher needs ...”

“... They did not stop her from carrying on with what she had to do to support herself (working as a lady’s companion, a seamstress, a schoolmistress, a governess, a writer) or from making bold efforts to protect others from harm or what she saw as harm. As a child she slept outside her mother’s bedroom door, thinking (‘mistakenly, or with ...”