“... stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in Dorchester: Tea at Max Gate. Lady Stacie there, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan – and a fashionable lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the tea-table. He shut her up by saying ‘I am not interested in my novels. I ...”

“... women were subject to much knightly attention. The elaborate code of service and subjection to a lady found in courtly love was not just a game. The presence of women in the audience at tournaments spurred men on in their combat with each other, turning this combat into a form of sexual display. Women occasionally took a more active part in chivalry’s ...”

“... view, gives an equal interest to the diary of a Dodd, an Amiel, or a Mabel Barrows, a young lady of 16 who in 1885 was keeping an artless private record at St Margaret’s School in Waterbury, Connecticut. ‘Mabel’, as she liked to be known to her friends – her real name was Mary – had various crushes on her fellow students (‘Carrie and I lay ...”

“... of a learned dining club. One of his stories concerned a don and a colleague, a nervous lady, who were doing the B. Lit. viva of a black man. The male don has a sudden fit, jumps to his feet, shouts, splutters, and turns coal black on the instant. The lady thus abruptly outnumbered runs from the room with outcries ...”

“... attendance as her daughter-in-law’s helpmeet. What could be more idyllic? Quite a lot, it seems. Lady Dorothy, being a Cavendish, made no secret of her loathing for the old lady or of her fast-diminishing marital passion. ‘Harold was not enthusiastic about the grapplings and gropings of the bed,’ Davenport-Hines ...”

“... client, not the stars. Thus he reports that on 16 June 1646 at 19.26 p.m. he was consulted by a lady who had repeatedly turned down a gentleman’s proposals of marriage, and now bitterly regretted it. She was tall, good-looking, blonde, round-faced and cheerful. In no time at all Lilly had discovered (from the stars) that her suitor was ...”

“... Jane’s country-mouse observations on the ball itself – particularly of the dangerous Lady Ashburton, whom she suspected of having designs on that grim organ, Thomas Carlyle’s heart, are hilarious. The halfway-mark volume pivots neatly on the mid-century year, 1850 – the cusp between the horrors of the ‘hungry Forties’ and the Imperial ...”

“... of gender relations, and to the significance in chivalry of ‘courtly love’. ‘To love a lady truly and honourably,’ Charny says, ‘is the right position to be in for those who desire to achieve honour.’ Love, as a force urging a knight forward to test his prowess ever more severely in order to make himself worthy of his beloved, is a recurrent ...”

“... turns to Vermeer. In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Pater remarks of ‘Lady Lisa’ that she is ‘older than the rocks among which she sits’; Ciaran Carson (Fishing for Amber, 1999) feels that the 17th-century Dutch walls in Vermeer’s paintings are ‘as old as Egypt’. As a man Vermeer is little more to us than a ...”

“... false, most monstrous and most cruel’. A later statement was more direct, mentioning ‘a young lady for whom I have a great attachment and regard. I will not repeat her name – I honour it too much. Upon my soul and honour, there is not on this earth a more virtuous and spotless creature than this young ...”

“... as though it were a dangerous instrument. Kept saying things like, ‘Did the Princess really know Lady Diana Cooper, Lady Cunard, Lady Colefax, Miss Rosamond Lehmann?’ We almost felt apologetic for knowing them ourselves . . . One wonders how he can and what he will make of such a ...”

“... there is a rich seam of Irish Gothic writing by women, from Regina Maria Roche and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) to Jane Elgee (Lady Wilde) and Elizabeth Bowen. If they were solidly reputable bourgeois, Irish Protestants also preserved a secret pact with the vagrant, the deviant, the unspeakable terror lurking in the ...”

“... caught up in exactly the same story form the basis of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. The old man leaves the money to his niece so that she can ‘meet the requirements of her imagination’. The phrase belongs to the old man’s son, Ralph, and so does the idea of the legacy. Just before he himself dies – he has been ill since the novel ...”

“... mythic prototype for female-on-female mayhem, the rebel is an Outraged Daughter and the boss lady her Wicked Old Mother: Clytemnestra’s doom is sealed when she puts her sex life ahead of her daughter’s. At other times it’s a matter of plain old class rage: a put-upon servant who’s had enough of a tyrannical mistress. In France in 1933 the ...”

“... clothes mark themselves out as stupid, vulgar or malicious. In Mansfield Park the culpably inert Lady Bertram is ‘a woman who spent her days in sitting nicely dressed on a sofa’. Mrs Elton in Emma condemns herself when she asks Jane Fairfax’s opinion as to whether she should put a particular trim on her white and silver poplin. After such a lapse we ...”