“... By 1792, the year of the monarchy’s fall, Jacques-Armand was a grown man; he had become, said a lady who had witnessed his kidnapping, a convinced republican and ‘the most bloodthirsty terrorist in Versailles’. In 1793 Louis XVI was tried and executed. Spectators ran up to the scaffold and dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood: was this reverence, or ...”

“... by the presence of a number of comic characters, Western denizens of Tangier, most notably a rich lady called Daisy, who has a grand house and many servants, and a large lesbian called ‘Uncle’ Eunice Goode, who stays in bed in her hotel a great deal when she is not in hot and determined pursuit of Hadija. When one of the locals, who has his own designs on ...”

“... old friends from America, Paris and England, rather than making a life in the town. She was the lady of the manor, keeping her eye on the convalescent homes at Groslay, giving a donation to the curé of St-Brice and paying out sums to local schools and charities. Though Lee alerts us to these hypothetical conjunctions, there is something dispiriting about ...”

“... a screening of the miscast Hitchcock version of Rope, he reactivated a shadowy earlier affair with Lady Ursula Chetwynd-Talbot, a novelist under the name ‘Laura Talbot’ who was generally known as ‘La’. Lois finally withdrew her moderately stabilising influence, divorcing him in 1953, and his marriage to La a year later was not a successful fresh ...”

“... said of Charlotte Smith, whose marriage was in its way no less catastrophic, ‘the life of this lady was a very chequered one.’ In retrospect, the odd defeat of God’s purpose in the early poem about Corsica can be seen to inaugurate a protracted interest in things just not working out as planned or as you might have otherwise expected. ‘Miss ...”

“... cameraman who’d followed my public career. Since apparently I could do no wrong with this young lady … Losing your virginity to a woman who has already constructed a shrine in your honour: what could be more transcendentally egotistical than that? Schmitt says that one of the characteristics of political romantics is that they lack a gift for real ...”

“... failure, had something to do with it as well. No book, no devastating book review. He married Lady Alexandra Haig, daughter of the field-marshal. Tall and commanding, a real-life ‘Mrs Exeter’, she was miserably married to an admiral when she and Trevor-Roper fell in love. Their letters survive, and are very touching. It was a strange match – a ...”

“... Some mildly louche shuddering occurs in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’: Beneath the lamp the lady bowed, And slowly rolled her eyes around; Then drawing in her breath aloud Like one that shuddered, she unbound The cincture from beneath her breast: Her silken robe, and inner vest, Dropt to her feet, and full in view, Behold! her bosom and half her side ...”

“... minutes did the driver get out of his seat to help me up – my opinion is changing. I am the old lady falling down and lacking the muscle power to get up. One of the most humiliating conclusions you can come to about yourself: it won’t get better (although the ‘fatness’ is water retention). But now, providing I don’t look at myself in the mirror in ...”

“... down some peculiar byways (the Spectator comments pages). The Better Together ‘Patronising Lady’ advert kept us entertained for ages. (Watch the ‘Valium Mix’. Or the one with subtitles. I love that ‘Eat your cereal’ immediately dropped into the language.) The most surreal moment, surely, was the arrival in Glasgow of sixty Labour MPs, trucked ...”

“... The bridge the train is crossing has always been assumed to be the railway bridge at Maidenhead. Lady Simon said she had been in the same compartment as Turner on a Great Western train from Exeter to London, and he told her that Rain, Steam and Speed was realised after he put his head out of the window of a train as it passed over the Thames at ...”

“... authority guised as exotic strangers in photographs sent to loved ones back home – Aladdin, Lady Precious Stream, or the Black King at Christ’s nativity, among other Orientals. The sequence of inversions and impersonations in the scene where Mr Rochester disguises himself as a Gypsy woman and tells Jane’s fortune is dizzy-making: insider playing ...”

“... Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the embodiment of Mother Ireland, is a play written in 1902 by Yeats and Lady Gregory in which she turns up, a mysterious old woman, in a County Mayo village at an opportune moment during the United Irishmen rising of 1798. The sole business of her visit is to exercise her eerie powers of thought control and inspire a fresh young man ...”

“... too many questions’. A quiet exit was finally arranged. I was once told by a very old lady what the source of the problem was. ‘We used to be taken to the Halletts’ when we were children,’ she said. ‘My sisters and I would be put in the nursery to play with Hugh, and he would line us all up at one end of the room and lecture, us. I could ...”

“... of voice or manner when people are carried away. In his time he had heard more than one fine lady lose her temper and always to his disillusionment. Yet now, he stood his ground, and, listening, fell into a positive enchantment. Sita could let herself go as much as she pleased, she could storm and rage, but no harm would ensue. Nor did the unfortunate ...”