“... Valérie Trierweiler​ ’s book about her life as a grande Hollandaise and France’s first lady, and then – abruptly – neither of those, is more hair-raising than the extracts in Paris Match suggested when they appeared on the eve of publication at the beginning of September. Her pain levels are out of control; rage, jealousy, self-pity, self-flattery and malice are the indices, on every page ...”

“... that they tell next to nothing about what people really wore. One can believe that when Venetia, Lady Digby came to van Dyck’s studio to pose as Prudence she brought her own white shift and pearls; her voluminous cloaks, on the other hand, surely came from the studio prop box (if not from imagination). But in van Dyck’s portraits, as in Rubens’s ...”

“... of what Ma sees, but with the murderer carefully left out, or never put in. There is an ageing lady by a river. We look at her confronting some geese, then at her head from the back, at an axe or heavy knife in close-up, at the police examining the murder scene. Later we see a man walking by the river; then his glance at the camera, which may mean, within ...”

“... to a younger, female relation. But since the American Constitution does not prescribe what a First Lady can or cannot do, there was nothing to stop Woodrow Wilson’s wife from moving in on his office when he was incapacitated by a stroke from 1919 to 1921. ‘I studied every paper sent from the different Secretaries or Senators,’ Mrs Wilson, the former ...”

“... reader of Twenties biographies, it would be no hard job to identify Lord Foppington’s friends my Lady Tattle, my Lady Prate, my Lady Titter and my Lady Leer. Comedy could also be right for another reason: the point about Stephen Tennant is that he kept ...”

“... The masters of this kind of narrative draw no attention to it at all. In Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’ the pair have met, found themselves making love, and then taken a cab along the sea-front and sat on a bench together in the dawn. Yalta was barely visible through the dawn mist; white clouds hung motionless on the mountain peaks. Not a leaf ...”

“... a poem arguing that Adam plucked the apple in a blessed hour because, had he refrained, Our Lady would never have been heaven’s queen. Many of the best lyrics are no longer than epigrams, including some that Hirsh classifies as ‘Poems whose meanings are hidden (but not necessarily unknown)’. These include ‘Ich am of Irlaunde’, that mysterious ...”

“... Tennyson, the Brownings, George Lewes (though Jane refused to have Mary Ann Evans in the house), Lady Harriet Baring and William Bingham Baring, Charles and Erasmus Darwin, Margaret Fuller, Ruskin, Ellen Twisleton, Margaret Oliphant, Froude: practically everybody, or at least practically everybody who either liked to talk or could bear, as Carlyle grew into ...”

“... the great guns of the battery given names: ‘The Reverend Collins’, ‘General Tilney’, ‘Lady Catherine de Bugg’. Something in the image hints at the mingling of pastoral and violence, of passion and illiteracy which can go to make up both human bonding and human learning, especially in Kipling’s late stories of love. The writer lost his only son ...”

“... his malarial visions of her at his bedside, and investigating the local legend of the ‘Red Lady’ believed to be his mother’s ghost, he begins to feel the spirits of the past as strongly as he felt them in his childhood. His detective work, at first jocular and unamazed – ‘Good grief, sounds like something Wilkie Collins might have put on in his ...”

“... convent, and broke into films in 1926. She made a great impression as the tempestuous leading lady in Doug Fairbanks’s The Gaucho. She livened up D.W. Griffith’s Lady of the Pavements considerably, all the while enjoying a well-rounded private life: after an affair with John Gilbert, she took up with young buck Gary ...”

“... of the bucks of his youth. ‘Dined with Mrs Smith which I found vastly dull.’ But there was Lady Hunter and Lady Pechell; and, after all, the dear Ponsonbys and Lady Q were so obleeging. Leeves, who was now over sixty, moved at ease in society. The trouble was he could not keep a ...”

“... the Prince, on a midnight visit to his office, a crucial letter confided to him by a client, Lady Beresford, as evidence of her husband’s infidelity with Daisy Brooke, who was also ‘the most beautiful and spirited of all Edward’s mistresses’. That Lewis resisted the Prince’s demand that he take the letter with him, presumably to destroy ...”

“... serving at table. The Lord Abbot in the 15th-century Jehan de Saintré seduces Jehan’s fickle lady with a Lenten between-meals collation that starts with spiced wine and sugared figs and proceeds to five further kinds of wine, salmon, lampreys and assorted other fish, all eaten while the Abbot and lady tangle feet ...”

“... A small dinner party – all I could manage – huddled at one end of the 30-foot dining-table. Lady Astor did not have a good press in my family. My father had served in North Africa and Italy with the Eighth Army, which Nancy had asserted in the House of Commons in 1944 was ‘dodging D-Day’. They returned singing to the tune of ‘Lili ...”