“... Alys Pearsall Smith, and to the woman who liberated him from the ruins of that first marriage, Lady Ottoline Morrell – must strike most readers as someone who, even in his early forties, was unequipped for adult emotional life. This volume, stout as it is, inevitably gives a fragmentary impression of Russell, even of Russell as a correspondent. Only a ...”

“... too much into an ancient object. As he remarked one day, ‘It was an excellent question of my lady Cotton, when Sir Robert Cotton was magnifying of a shoe, which was Mose’s or Noah’s, and wondering at the strange shape and fashion of it: But Mr Cotton, says she, are you sure it is a shoe?’ The 20th-century art historian Martin Kemp has spent his ...”

“... the actress Perdita, but was at this point in prison for debt – titled Elegiac Verses to a Young Lady, on the death of her brother who was slain at the late engagement at Boston.Robinson was one of many women who were published by Johnson and who enjoyed the intellectual freedom of his dining room. Unlike Paterson, who devoted only one of his pensées in ...”

“... Freya suspected that, had Gertrude been alive when she arrived in Baghdad, the ‘Khatun’ (‘Lady of the Court’), as she was known, might not have been kind to her, notorious as she was for putting other women down. Like Freya herself, Gertrude admired the young men who administered, single-handed, large tracts of lawless territory. ‘They are ...”

“... Edmund Wilkie is sceptical. You will think differently, he tells her, ‘when you decide to be a lady novelist, and get set to write a long novel by Proust out of George Eliot, and it won’t get up and walk.’ The author of The Virgin in the Garden was also 17 in 1953, but Frederica Potter is not A.S. Byatt – even if subsequent novels have shown her ...”

“... Shortly after the defeat of Napoleon, the young Grand Duke Nicholas had come to England. Lady Charlotte Campbell found him ‘devilish handsome’, while others, less frivolously, thought that he might one day put Russia on the Western path of enlightenment. Alas, when Nicholas succeeded as tsar in 1825, he dashed liberal hopes, hanging the ...”

“... defaulted on their payments. A third sequence, the most famous, features the so-called ‘Bunny Lady’, a Flint widow who has resorted to selling rabbits for a living (‘pets or meat’), skinning one of these creatures as it hangs from a tree, getting it ready to be fried. None of these images is subtle. All are what Kael would call ‘cheap’. But on ...”

“... she had set herself of stiffening the Duce against his sea of troubles.’ Not every Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, it turns out, has fits of conscience and bad dreams. Claretta and Mussolini seem to have felt pretty sanguine about their own actions, only regretting the ways in which others let them down and prevented their plans from coming to fruition. ‘I am ...”

“... clearly expected deference and devotion from his daughter, though he received neither. ‘The Oval Lady’, a story written around the same time as ‘The Debutante’, conjures up the atmosphere of paternal tyranny and filial insubordination. Its young heroine, Lucretia, likes to play with her rocking horse, Tartar, even though her father (‘the ...”

“... and that the qualifications for being a councillor were to be the same as those for being a voter. Lady Sandhurst stood for a seat on the London County Council in 1889 and won by a clear majority. Her opponent sought a court order disqualifying her on the ground that a woman, not being a person, could not be a fit person of full age. One of the judges, Sir ...”

“... all the whimsicality of late Faulkner. The best two stories, from 1944 and 1950, deal with a rich lady buying a fur coat from a poor lady. It must have been clear to him around the time he read the New York Times on 16 November 1959 that, despite his gifts and his early start and his many friends, his literary legacy was ...”

“... as favourite of the gods – served to illustrate policy. The handsome portrait of Venetia, Lady Digby as Prudence is in quite a different style from that of the defeated figures of Lust (a crumpled, fallen Cupid) and Deceit (Janus-faced and gypsy-dark) which cower at her side. The picture was a piece of posthumous reparation, Sir Kenelm Digby wanting ...”

“... some money of his own by using his nose and publishing a number of bestselling books including Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He had many affairs, and moved in a world in which his wife had little interest, except that it was new, and she liked things that were new, even if she often missed the point of them. She missed the point of Proust, for example: that ...”

“... extraordinaire, brings it all back. By all accounts, de Acosta (1893-1968) was a serious lady ghoul. So lamia-like her sartorial mode – she favoured black silk cloaks and trousers, tricorn hats, blood-red lipstick and cadaverish white face-powder – Tallulah Bankhead was not the only acquaintance to nickname her ‘Countess Dracula’. Yet such ...”

“... her dust-jackets. She is pretty, she is pert, she is immaculately chic; she signifies drop-dead lady wit, a flirt, a charmer, a dandyess and a poseuse. If somebody has put this sort of effort into their self-projection, it’s kind of by the way to call them affected or inauthentic, for, unlike, say, Simone de Beauvoir, they have never pretended to be ...”