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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... work by a 21st-century writer, could well look at the opening of Sanditon – ‘A Gentleman and a Lady travelling from Tunbridge towards that part of the Sussex coast which lies between Hastings and Eastbourne, being induced by business to quit the high road and attempt a very rough lane, were overturned in toiling up its long ascent’ – and rule it out as ...”

“... the course of some research on Sir Robert Dudley, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Leicester by Lady Douglas Sheffield. Dudley had made various half-hearted efforts to prove his legitimacy, a matter of some delicacy in that his mother was now married to another man – in fact to Sir Edward Stafford, Drury’s brother-in-law. The legalities of Dudley’s ...”

“... to publish shopping guides that stressed expertise; under the rubric ‘Shopping in London’, the Lady told women ‘where and how to shop’, and warned against bringing one’s spouse along. The Lady Guide Association was formed to provide professional guides ‘Certificated for Shopping’. American women were more ...”

“... House of Windsor. In public, the Prime Minister professes respect and admiration for her sovereign lady and the whole royal family. But it is difficult to believe that in private she offers the same unstinted ‘devotion’ that Disraeli lavished so fulsomely (and so calculatingly) on his ‘faery queen’. As the visible embodiment of stultifying ...”