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“... to England, ‘of course I screamed with laughter.’ When a Spaniard suggests to her sister Lady Mosley mat Evelyn Waugh was only a Roman Catholic ‘for a joke’, ‘we screamed with laughter.’ And so on and so on. I am not being so puritanical as to deny that – at the time – all this must have been screamingly funny. On the printed page, I ...”

“... inner life. Here Tomalin makes some risky moves. Arbitrarily chosen characters from the novels – Lady Susan, Marianne Dashwood, Mary Crawford – speak for their author’s repressed desires. Unsupported guesses, strategically placed in the story, take the weight of the biographer’s argument. Of Austen’s first months in Bath, Tomalin remarks: ‘Jane was ...”

“... Royal Irish Academy: an Irish countess, a Russian princess, a young woman from Co. Cork and her lady’s maid. They come to us from the journals that the young woman, Katherine Wilmot, kept during her travels on the Continent in 1801-3 and to Russia from 1805 to 1807, and sent home to her family. Parts of these journals have already been published, in ...”

“... for fifteen years when Wallis Simpson arrived on the scene. Blackwood explained to the old lady how the Duchess was being sequestered in Paris by her lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum, who was obsessed with her, and that she was officiously being kept alive, although rumoured to be comatose, to have turned black and to have shrivelled to the size of a ...”

“... tourist said to me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just sitting here, witnessing great joy.’Titian-haired Lady Margaret Montagu Douglas Scott is a bit of a one. A short, sharp Scot, she is the second daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, ‘one of the most eminent peers in the land’, and his duchess, the ‘daughter of the Second Marquess of Bath, and ...”

“... use of a toothbrush was a mark of the difference between us and them, gentry and peasant, or so Lady Gregory suggested when she made the remark – jocular, perhaps, and not the sort of sally she would have chosen to be remembered by. Colm Tóibín makes more than one allusion to it in this essay, gently hinting that his sympathies are with the ...”

“... the favour of relative plainness. In an earlier autobiographical book, Remake (1996), the ‘old lady’, a kind of fictional double, does ‘think about the techniques of fiction’, but nevertheless offers a perspicuous narrative of what might be thought a life interesting in itself, even to readers who shrink from narratological exercise. For this old ...”

“... fastening her suspenders in a hotel room she heard a smart knock and in came a tall, handsome lady, very cross, saying: ‘This is my bedroom. Booked in my name. Why are you here?’ The sitting tenant, her temper rising, said: ‘I am within my rights ... I don’t have to be out until twelve.’ At this point the manager intervened with ‘This is the ...”

“... on famous literary salons, from that of Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, held in Berlin in the 1820s, to Lady Cunard’s gatherings in the Dorchester which lasted into the 1940s. Both deal with an elusive subject-matter. The purpose of the salon was to promote good talk in good company, and neither the talk nor the social qualities needed to draw it out leave much ...”

“... Table Round. ‘If reputation’s what you want, we do provide a lake of it to swim in, though any Lady you encounter there might very well be wet.’ More mirth. Sir Tristram-Sitting-Next-To-Me remarked: ‘Decline the Lady’s hand. The lake’s polluted. It’s a trap. Do not accept the Windmill Chain, the Stretched-Horse ...”

“... Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) is known to us as the author of travel writings, witty poems and remarkable letters. If it were not for Isobel Grundy’s diligent work in the archives, we should not know that Lady Mary also produced prose fiction. This is hardly strange. She published in her own time neither the travel writings nor (of course) her letters to her daughter ...”

“... wrote angry letters to the Wildes and published a pamphlet about a girl raped by a doctor. When Lady Wilde wrote to Travers’s father, accusing her of trying to extort money from her husband, she sued and gave evidence in court about the affair, which appeared prominently in the newspapers. Constance’s family too was not, as it were, without sin. Her ...”

“... because the overall argument is afforced by personal observation. Thus at one point he describes Lady Thatcher as ‘mistress of the irrelevant detail’ and notes how in meetings she would cling to one unimportant fact from which she could not be prised. This was widely known before she became prime minister and many examples (some of them very ...”

“... me!’Catalpa‘Did you ever find out about that tree?’ the wife asks.     ‘A lady in the park told me – it’s catalpa!’     ‘A lady in the park? Who is the lady in the park?’     ‘She probably had a dog,’ her husband says.     ‘You were ...”

“... of the title. Each section consists of a series of missives from the same seven correspondents: Lady Amherst. Todd Andrews, Jacob Horner, A.B. Cook, Jerome Bray, Ambrose Mensch and the Author. The last-named ‘character’ is the ‘real’ John Barth, and Lady Amherst is a new invention; the other five are ...”