“... 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 ...”

“... just being Mrs Richard Dalloway: ‘What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab.’ For a moment, wrapped in the sound and scent of the Bond Street flower shop, like the young Woolf caught up in the buzz and croon outside Talland House, she seems to stand on the threshold of a rapture which promises to ‘surmount’ the ...”

“... great gun discharged. Silent. A cloud that was the city. A painted scream. Silent, only for the lady playing ‘Rustle of Spring’ in an empty dark shed of a hall. Nobody comes. Only our feet go crunch-crunch in and out of step as they fall, all the way ...”

“... floating in the dark beneath the skull. My son is learning insects ladybird and beetle Painted Lady may or dragonfly and watching I think of how the mind evolves one meeting at a time spider and fly the lizard stage where everything is tuned to warmth the moonlit phase a month of songbirds in this house amid the fields we’ve rented for a summer how the ...”

“... Well, sez I, I know the remedy for that. It’s in a garden. There’s a charming young lady there transfixed in time. She gracefully lifts the hem of her dress and at the same time shoos away the birds with a gesture of her hand. Voilà! That’s it . . . or try some oil of sagacity. Travelling in the Genetic Code My heart is looking for Elysium ...”

“... and Sophia whom she despised – are characters who recur throughout the book. Sophia became Lady Berwick and so was in a position to be embarrassed: Wilson chose to do it by depicting her as a simpleton who agrees with whatever is said to her and whose only enthusiasm is dinner. The result is a girl who might be a dim and not so distant cousin of the ...”

“... of Champagne, give their verdicts. In one decision, coming close to home, Eleanor criticises a lady who wishes to stay with her lover even after he has discovered their kinship. A woman who ‘seeks to preserve an incestuous love’, she warns, ‘is going against what is right and proper’.Did courts of love exist? For many decades, scholars treated De ...”

“... which is commonly known by the name of its villain, the sensuous enchanter Comus, the chaste Lady (oh, no self-portrait there then, from the poet known as the Lady of Christ’s) hears music, and then abruptly throws off its alluring charms with a string of abstract nouns:             A thousand fantasies ...”

“... In one of George Eliot’s Scenes from Clerical Life a lady addicted to reading tracts skims rapidly over references to Zion or the River of Life, but has her attention immediately caught by any mention of ‘pony’ or ‘boots and shoes’. A reader of modern biographies can see why. The best things in them are usually the facts, the objects, the unexplained and inexplicable things that cluttered up the lives of the august and famous, as they do everybody else’s, and now find a place in the story ...”

“... well:I can do no better at this stage than describe my own punishment chamber, which I call the Lady Chapel.   This is not blasphemy on my part. It is a chapel to the Lady (the Lady I serve) in her aspect as Aphrodite Philomastrix. It is a room dedicated to the use of the birch-rod ...”

“... Private Eye and jail its editor, Richard Ingrams – an effort which was supported by Wilson and Lady Falkender, both victims of Ingrams’s harassment, and which petered out in a relatively painless settlement in 1976? Ingrams’s theory is that there was such a connection. Goldsmith is no great exporter (France is without Marmite) and the ecologist is his ...”

“... cunning she dissembles this passion, writing to her close friend back home that she has met a lady called Simonetta Perkins who is in the same predicament, and what advice should she be given? The comedy is delicate and poignant too, with an anti-climactic climax of droll simplicity. Minor characters are masterfully etched, in particular a just-married ...”

“... child Jesus lived had been transported by angels in three stages to Loreto in Italy. (Today, Our Lady of Loreto is the patron saint of airline pilots.) In Dublin he would find himself drawn into raucous nationalist politics; in England he felt himself travestied, reviled and belittled. All of this Newman’s Unquiet Grave portrays in superbly incisive ...”

“... is sometimes also used for Jessica, who is mainly Decca but sometimes Squalor. Nancy is French Lady but sometimes just Lady; in everyday settings she answers to Naunce or Naunceling. Lady Redesdale is The Poor Old Female or Fem and her husband is most often Farve. Diana is sometimes ...”

“... whatever, like the exploding manhole covers of Skopje. How open was it? To here a former first lady, the victims were visited too and down there for ten days without a punchline. He’s only got seven kids and none of these are tea drinkers. Restrictions led the way, then grunge too passed, leaving a dimpled wake much prized by amateurs. What to ...”