“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pilgrims to a shrine at Knock, in County Clare. Why put the pilgrims on a train to pray to Our Lady of Knock if He was going to detain them with injuries after the train crashed into the cows? He must have planned it out, right from the moment He created Knock, centuries ago. It was hard to get news of the earthquake’s damage directly from my motel, but ...”

“... Corps, the Women’s Forage Corps, the Women’s Police Service, the Women’s Legion and the Lady Instructors’ Signal Company. The authors note a tendency for women, having achieved the right to wear a self-designed uniform, to individualise it according to fancy. Out of uniform, there were women ...”

“... at the hands of devious mad-doctors was not as excruciating or as prolonged as that of the young Lady Mordaunt, whose father sought to prove her insane in order to save the Prince of Wales from scandal. But it was a bad day for Georgina when a sinister black landau pulled into Tavistock Square with a medical snatch squad. It would not be correct to say that ...”

“... engagement, women’s a slovenly lack of self-restraint. Ever since The Rivals (1775), where Lady Slattern ‘cherishes her nails for the purpose of making marginal notes’ in circulating-library romances, it’s been a commonplace to assume that (as Thackeray put it) ‘much may be learned with regard to lovely woman by a look at the book she reads in ...”

“... figure, a ‘comely shape’, until she turns: She left the window – and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps – and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer – and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The ...”