“... 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 ...”

“... Countess of; bluestockings; Dacre, Charlotte; Edgeworth, Maria; Hemans, Felicia Dorothea; Lamb, Lady Caroline; Lee, Harriet; Lee, Sophia; Radcliffe, Ann: Sévigné, Marie de; Seward, Anna; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft; Staël-Holstein, Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de Worldly, informed and informal, the index is a fitting finale to an edition which extends ...”

“... of Horace’s ‘Quis multa gracilis’ is very different. In this ode the poet imagines his lady, Pyrrha, in the arms of some smooth young man and, instead of raging jealously, pities his rival – the lady will be false to him as she has been to the poet:              O how oft shall he On Faith and ...”

“... second chamber variously at about 50 per cent (1998) and 84 per cent (1999). Lord Callaghan, Lady Thatcher, Sir Edward Heath, John Major and Cardinal Winning all met the Commissioners. So did the editors of the Times and the Guardian, Lord Habgood, Lord Howe, the Duke of Buccleuch (the only duke to surface), Professors Scruton and Bogdanor, as well as ...”

“... Imagination was a visitor to pleasure gardens. Anna Margaretta Larpent was a moderately prosperous lady living in London in the late 18th century, married to the state official responsible for vetting plays before they reached the stage. For over fifty years she kept a journal detailing her pursuit of culture: her energetic reading (The Rights of Man before ...”

“... frequent the disguised ‘Goat and Compasses’, and you will perhaps succeed in unveiling ‘Lady Evers’, the socially energetic wife of an ex-Governor of the ‘Laxative Islands’, or ‘Judy Mustard’, whose ecological fervour does not shrink from the extreme of offering her fellow believers home-made wine derived from ‘Purging ...”

“... family; especially they help to knock two familiar and false generalisations on the head. Honor Lady Lisle – downright, businesslike, self-centred and sensible – would have been astonished to hear that 16th-century women lived a life of helpless slavery, and the loving relations between herself and her much older husband hammer yet another nail in the ...”

“... Regency English, Georgette Heyer’s Frederica and the continuation of ‘Sanditon’ by Another Lady. He conducts some tests comparing the idiolects of the leading characters in each novel in his sample with the commonest words in the author’s narration, setting out the results in tables, and in some elegant and expressive graphs. (This is, obviously, no ...”

“... go according to plan, a story given to us in incomplete instalments, was one of the subjects of Lady Oracle (1976); at the end of that novel, the heroine, Joan, says: ‘I won’t write any more Costume Gothics, though; I think they were bad for me. But maybe I’ll try some science fiction.’ Joan’s words seem prophetic of her own creator’s ...”