“... by the eccentric, neurotic Margery Kempe: ‘hir mende was raveschyd in-to beholdyng of owr Lady offeryng hyr blisful Sone owre Savyour to the preyst Simeon in the Tempyl, as verily to hir gostly undirstondyng as [if] sche had ben ther in hir bodily presens.’ The same scene was enacted in the late medieval religious plays, which Duffy claims had a ...”

“... by his sending ‘a muff of gardenias’ to his niece’s coming-out ball. Her parents, Lord and Lady Glenconner, launched their daughter with Austerity-busting splendour. A marquee, a New Look dress from Dior, a pillar of dry ice and she was ‘out’. Out into what is the question that occupies the rest of the book. What is a well-connected, semi-educated ...”

“... These essays have something in common with Edith Holden’s The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (now available in Japanese and shortly on jigsaw puzzles), which has been on the best-seller list for nearly three years and has sold over a million and a half copies: it has some pretty pictures of cowslips and some less appealing portraits of fat, rather ...”

“... addition, she had been gay, with those big old teeth, long before such time as being gay and First Lady was even conceptual. She, Alison, could not hope to compete in the category of those ladies. Not yet, anyway! A lot of what’s appealing about Saunders is at loose here: his easy way with grandly deployed casual diction, the humour wrung from malapropism ...”

“... of money); he speaks of adoring the ‘soulful blue eyes’ and kissing the ‘velvet’ hand of Lady Garvagh (who was married to a cousin of the prime minister, George Canning), of peeping beneath the scanty rags of a comely Irish harvester, and playing charades with teenage girls in the house of Lady Morgan in ...”

“... sneering at labradors & joggers disaffected deer . . . I have no news. I am boring old lady. Have to stop myself from talking to grocery clerks about my grandchildren or my cat. * One of my classes gave me a fabulous gift. It is a cup, with Denver skyline & a moon – When you pour hot coffee in it the pope appears in the sky! So dear heart – my ...”

“... of celebrity biographies. Gossip, of course, is important, but Antonia Fraser is too much of a lady to gossip, rather than simply allow famous names to flutter gracefully onto each page. And although I quite see that loved ones, relatives, friends want to share memories, does it really matter to the majority of us who do not know them, how much Pinter and ...”

“... voyage. Later on, wondering why they’d had no premonition of disaster, people remembered one old lady who, fearing a calamity, had gone to bed each night in her clothes. But old ladies are like that and no one paid any attention. Long before it was launched the idea had somehow got about that the Titanic was unsinkable – and that one way or another was ...”

“... don’t know that Mrs Horrocks quite means this, officer. What you said to me on the phone, young lady, was ...’ I said: ‘Henry. You weren’t there.’ The policeman winks and says: ‘Now then, we don’t want another shooting match do we?’ I mean at first Henry didn’t even know who they were. He said: ‘Not the chow?’ I said: ‘No. That’s the ...”

“... wish, like you, I could console myself with reading novels or even writing them’, he wrote to Lady Londonderry in September 1857, ‘but I have lost all zest for fiction and have for many years.’ British India was in rebellion, and Britain was shocked and outraged. Disraeli was dismayed by the atrocities, but detected wild exaggeration and was one of ...”

“... was. She was a great comedienne whose life ended in tragedy. Her theatrical repertoire ranged from Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal to Rosalind in As You Like It. She played women, breeches-part men, and women dressed up as men – and all of these even when heavily and visibly pregnant. She was portrayed by Hoppner as ‘The Comic Muse’, by Romney as ...”

“... us all. Eliza, Shaw told Ellen Terry in 1912, was ‘almost as wonderful a fit’ for Mrs Pat as Lady Cicely (the role he had lovingly designed for her in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion) for Ellen Terry: ‘for I am,’ he added, ‘a good ladies’ tailor, whatever my shortcomings.’ Perhaps it is just that the psychological circumstances coincide or ...”

“... dispossession sank in, though Young himself sometimes fails to realise this. Thus he instances Lady Warnock feeling a ‘kind of rage’ as she sees Mrs Thatcher on television choosing her clothes at Marks and Spencer and reckons there was something ‘obscene’ about it ‘in a way that’s not exactly vulgar, just low’. ...”

“... to Chatham, and tellingly illustrates the state of the roads around Lewes: ‘I saw an ancient lady, and a lady of a very good quality, I assure you, drawn to church in her coach with six oxen; nor was it done in frolick or humour, but meer necessity, the way being so still and deep, that no horses could go in it.’ How ...”

“... in it. Criticism of Baden-Powell, as the author notes, was ‘held in check by the longevity of Lady Baden-Powell, who guarded her husband’s reputation fiercely’. What a nuisance those old widows are! Now B.-P. can be called a liar and worse. Ridicule of the founder of Scouting must naturally be extended to Scouts. They ‘littered parks with the ...”