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“... description of that moment of biographical contact carries an echo of Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ (‘I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark/Suddenly, his expression in a glass’). In The Merchant of Prato she borrows a more challenging metaphor. The book’s opening words – epigraphic if not actually placed as an epigraph – are by ...”

“... a professor troll, whom he observed through a keyhole eating his own wife. The Troll was eating a lady. Poor girl, she was tightly clutched to its breast by those rudimentary arms, with her head on a level with its mouth. She was dressed in a nightdress which had crumpled up under her armpits, so that she was a pitiful naked offering, like a classical picture ...”

“... why Wilson allowed him to do so. Present in these pages, for example, is the tale of the Beautiful Lady In Red (though, unlike most of the others, not very well told). This concerns a state ball in the capital of Brazil, where our hero, as Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, is the guest of honour. When the orchestra strikes up a ...”

“... the wife of Gilbert de Préville Colvile and of Tom, the fourth Baron Delamere. Gwladys, Lady Delamere (Tom’s stepmother, wife of the third Baron, who broke the news to Broughton that ‘Joss is wildly in love with Diana’). Plus a number of walk-on, climb-on or lie-down roles for assorted ex-Etonian or Brigade of Guards adulterers, big-game ...”

“... Gilroy took temporary jobs, as a filing clerk in a mail-order sweatshop and as a uniformed maid to Lady Anne (no surname given), a determined supporter of the empire. Often sympathetic in her descriptions of others, particularly women and children, Gilroy can also be unsparing. She notes that Hilda, the ruthless manageress of the sweatshop, keeps a special ...”

“... was the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, a cousin of Lord David Cecil, et cetera, and became a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret – the next best thing, perhaps, to Betjeman bagging a royal. His relationship with Cavendish was clearly one of the most important in his life, but the reader is left to infer from Hillier’s silences, or to guess from the ...”

“... out a name. In fact, I’m that young man with thick spectacles in the library. I flirt with a lady who wears them too and has an interest in creative writing. She’s all in white and her smile reveals a row of white teeth over which she has stuck cellophane like a child. I see the house where we’ll spend our remaining years: our faces redden in the ...”

“... like that accent. Please don’t come slouching near my bed again.’ So, real cool, I growled, ‘Lady, no way you’ll walk right over me.’ Dead on. I chucked her then. The Rosetta Stone We were real good and got to share a desk that smelt like the head’s Bible when I lifted up its lid and nicked a sharp HB from Eileen’s leather pouch, knowing that she ...”

“... birth simultaneously in the same two-roomed cabin). Zadel was a journalist who had hung out at Lady Wilde’s literary salon in London and was so close to Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she signed letters to her ‘Mother’. She also appears to have been a medium, which talent she passed on to her second daughter-in-law (the ‘other woman’). When ...”

“... I did, when taking up Part of his Gown to fan himself with; and acting in Character of a prudish Lady, he said: ‘Well, I don’t know what to think; Women may be honest that do such things, but for my Part I never could bear to touch any Man’s Flesh – except my Husband’s, whom perhaps,’ says he, ‘she wish’d at the Devil.’ Swift’s fleshly ...”

“... pieces were gathered in a mini-collection of manuscript epigrams presented to his wife’s mother, Lady Rogers, which Harington lovingly bound together with a presentation copy of his Ariosto. In other poems in this collection he berated his mother-in-law for her scolding tongue and for her tendency to side with his wife in domestic disputes. We can only ...”

“... desire was not to be any kind of a celebrity. But the quiet suburb was not altogether safe. Lady Ottoline Morrell called, with the best intentions. Charlotte hid. Lady Ottoline left flowers and a message with the housekeeper. Charlotte wrote that she could only go to London by appointment. ...”

“... thought up an escape plan, and decided who would carry it out. The prince, dressed as Flora’s lady’s maid, would be shipped across the Minch to Skye, where he and Flora’s mother could shelter them. Did he consult Flora about his scheme, or give her a chance to back out? Apparently not. Like everyone around her, she knew that the prince was on the ...”

“... advice-givers had moved on to new fields; for example, offering a tip or two to a young lady newly ravaged by smallpox on how to hold on to her lover, with complementary advice to a gallant robbed of an eye and a leg in battle on how to retain his mistress’s affection. John Debrett’s flagship was the Peerage, which rode the generations like HMS ...”

“... and humour, and spreads inter-racial and inter-class tolerance. Her best friend is a school dinner lady married to a washing-machine repairman. The trouble is that it is difficult to emphasise the admirable nature of Lyris’s attitude without making her sound patronising. The rest of the cast is divided into goodies, baddies and what you might call lost ...”