“... in Scotland, at the house – an open-house sort of house – of his widowed mother-in-law, Lady Drysdale, with whom he and his wife were living. Within a week or two of the encounter Isabella took a trip to the coast, and sitting on the beach, drew up an inventory of her defects: my errors of youth, my provocations to my brothers and my sisters, my ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Let Fall,/Most Women Have No Characters at All.’ The opening lines of Pope’s ‘Epistle to a Lady’ could be used to describe Hester’s literary-critical afterlife, a series of affectionate or antagonistic dismissals. James Clifford began his fine 1942 biography with the observation that ‘today, even in the perspective of over a century, she still ...”

“... in the woods, the Grandmother cries: ‘You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got!’   ‘Lady,’ The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into ...”

“... liberation’. The words are those of the novelist E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady was the ancestor of Bridget Jones. There was a sense of relief at emerging into a world from which the constraints of the Edwardian age had been blown away. The loss of 880,000 men meant that many women would never marry, but they would have the vote and ...”

“... Rosalind, was the daughter of the classical scholar and all-round good egg Gilbert Murray and Lady Mary, daughter of the earl and countess of Carlisle, owners of Castle Howard and much else. Arnold J. Toynbee’s uncle, also called Arnold, had died young in 1883 after a promising beginning as a social reformer and radical economic historian (he is ...”

“... her to a tea shop for a snack and Virginia Woolf was sitting at the next table. (Neither great lady deigned to acknowledge the other.) And not long ago I met an elderly female couple – two very elegant Syrian women – who had lived for many years in Paris on the rue Jacob, across from the house in which the flamboyant lesbian writer and expatriate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was persuaded.’ By the Twenties, she had become enthralled by the glamour and political clout of Lady Astor, the Conservative MP who raised money from the rich for McMillan’s causes. Dedicating to Astor – with the epigraph ‘Party is not enough’ – the ‘Life’ she wrote of her own sister Rachel, McMillan concluded her political career with an ...”

“... worthy and more extraordinary. Washington recapitulates the story as told in the books of Lady Emily Lutyens and her daughter Mary, both deeply involved in it, to the dismay of Lady Emily’s husband, the architect Edwin Lutyens. Krishnamurti, son of an Indian Theosophist hangeron, was picked up on a Madras beach by ...”

“... limited-edition collector’s items that this book describes? In Britain it was not until the Lady Chatterley trial that ‘the masses’ were permitted to read a work formerly deemed pornographic. The celebrated question posed by the prosecution counsel – ‘would you be willing for your wives or servants to read this book?’ – reminds us of the ...”

“... out merely to be ‘mashed bananas and chunky peanut butter’. He first masturbated while reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover – a classy vehicle to inaugurate the venerable habit. Art-historical parlour game: hypothesise the circumstances of the first time Cézanne masturbated. (Or Nadar. Or Duchamp. Or Arbus.) Not yet sexually self-aware, Mapplethorpe ...”