“... English girl who walks out, however harmlessly, with a coloured American soldier,’ a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, the queen mother, wrote to Violet Markham in 1942, ‘should be made to understand that she will very probably cause his death.’ Her remark manages to express in one breath solicitude for the girl and the soldier and raw prejudice ...”

“... by her first name and surname; but if she’s married to a knight or baronet then she’s ‘Hon. Lady’ followed by her surname; and if she’s married to a commoner she’s just ‘Hon. Mrs’ followed by her surname. There are pages and pages of this U and Non-U, posher-than-posh tosh. The guidance also states that ‘a title of nobility should always be ...”

“... out of politics reached an apogee with ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ (1959), in which the Lady Arrogant – as enemies sometimes called her – took one look at the famous picture of Elizabeth Eckford, the lone Black girl on her way into school being yelled at by a line of hate-filled whites, and decided that the most important thing going on in it ...”

“... daughter, prancing round the lounge, simpering and chanting ‘Look at me, I’m a Miss World lady,’ but it’s like sex-and-gender-based oppression is a sore head or a streaky patch on a window. Find the remedy, and it’s gone. Limbo dancing, Peter Hain’s sideburns, the Angry Brigade, King Crimson: these films are always so good on perky period ...”

“... it with alacrity. Very soon after, his new wife’s ex-colleague, a very large and formidable lady equally unconjugal in temperament, found herself in the same quandary, so Auden (exclaiming ‘What else are buggers for?’ in a perhaps only slightly complex tone) produced like a rabbit out of a hat a friend of E.M. Forster’s, who happened to be slight ...”

“... probably wrote in the year Jervas was painting his portrait, 1717, the ‘Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady’: which, tender and beautiful as much of it is, had such difficulty dramatising personal feeling through the (in practice) highly unstable characters of the heroine, the villainous uncle, the lover and the poet (and are these last two the same?) as to earn ...”

“... women, already beside themselves with fear, swore to the interpreter that the little old lady was mad, she’d been mad for some time, she was confusing Marinkovic with another man, who had, in any case, left the hospital and fled north into Serbia proper. There was no one from the Krajina here, they were sure of it. And when we walked them round to ...”

“... practice of vaccination in fact came to England from the folk-healers of the Ottoman Empire, via Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Edward Jenner himself credited it as common knowledge among farm people that those who had had cowpox could safely nurse those ill from smallpox, and that those who had had smallpox did not get cowpox. And while his having learnt ...”

“... meetings, once at a state dinner in the White House and another time, while she was still First Lady, at one of George Plimpton’s gatherings on the Upper East Side. Now, arriving with his wife for the first party she’d invited him to in her new home, Podhoretz distinguished himself from her obsequious admirers both by his dress and even more ...”

“... the theatre of the conte philosophique. A Voltairean aside such as ‘Mélinade (the name of the lady, which I had my reasons for withholding, not having thought of it until now)’ is every bit as unaccommodating as Samuel Beckett’s ‘and for other reasons better not wasted on cunts like you’. Voltaire regarded the short tale as a duel with the ...”

“... Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ and writes that ‘during the years-long squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls’ – why? The answer is obvious: too sweaty. Wallace perspires freely in the foreground, while Paltrow perches mauve-and-beigely on her stool ...”

“... reinforced by what he had seen during his voyage on the Beagle. In Brazil, he lived near an old lady who kept instruments of torture to crush the fingers of her female slaves. ‘I have stayed,’ Darwin wrote, ‘in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal ...”

“... in which Leiris tried to trace his initiation into manhood, and from seeing the mysterious Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, just brought out from wartime storage: ‘What has it meant to me to be a woman?’ At first, she protested to Sartre that her sex ‘just hasn’t counted’. Look again, he said. ‘You weren’t brought up in the same way as a ...”

“... of Ferrara surely fathered Gilbert Osmond, Henry James’s lethal dilettante in The Portrait of a Lady: a man who at first represents ‘the artistic life’ to the naive heroine, but whose antiquarian talent proves in fact confined, in a penetrating image, to tracing the common coinage of the world around him, just as Ferrara ends triumphantly with ‘cast ...”

“... I’m trying to lose.’ ‘Still. We could maybe find something.’ ‘I am going​ to marry a lady that has a little girl about your age,’ my father had said. ‘And this little girl has not got any father. So you have to promise me one thing and that is that you will never tease her or say anything mean to her about that. There’ll be times when you ...”