“... are near-perfect. ‘Pray, who are the Men most worne of late?’ demands a garrulous ‘fine Lady’ in the satire ‘Artemiza to Chloe’. ‘When I was marry’d, Fooles were a la mode.’ On occasion he could be fastidious about stylistic decorum. ‘The lousiness of affairs in this place,’ he wrote to his friend Henry Savile in 1679, ‘is such ...”

“... then what is it? What monstrous vanity would think it was perfectly natural for a little old a lady to receive a tumultuous welcome from her hotel staff? Of course she didn’t believe she was really famous, towards the end. She knew she wasn’t famous enough. These are not the passions of a woman who knows her place.Nevertheless, to believe women are not ...”

“... relief, not least that of the unhappy secretary of the Society for Purer Australian History, Lady Cravenburn suddenly arrives from England, and recognising a chance too good to be missed, dismisses historical minutiae, even implying shared blood between the families due to some unspecified bastardy back in the Home Counties in the 18th ...”

“... relic has its double in romance. In the bloodthirsty Perlesvaus, from the early 13th century, a lady called the Queen of the Circle of Gold sets the crown in a reliquary of gold and precious stones, anticipating the French king, even though she is still a pagan. Eventually she crowns the hero Perceval with the precious circlet, presents herself for ...”

“... as two people (‘utter ruin to us’) and, more specifically, as two women: ‘the report of lady-authorship,’ Bradley wrote, ‘will dwarf & enfeeble our work at every turn … And we have many things to say the world will not tolerate from a woman’s lips.’But what did they want to say? In conversation with Oscar Wilde, Bradley and Cooper agreed ...”

“... Grey joined the couple for a ‘funny visit’ to Cloan, Haldane’s house in Perthshire, where Lady Grey was embarrassed by the tastelessness of Margot’s repartee. Haldane, steadfastly devoted to the memory of the first Mrs Asquith, never ceased to blame her successor for having led his friend astray. ‘London society came ... to have a great attraction ...”

“... a writer, she tells her grown-up daughter, she would put it all in a novel and title it The Maiden Lady. Her memory is prepared to sift and resettle actual events, touching up certain episodes, assigning blame and reward, and bringing the story to rich, ripe resolution. The daughter is offended by her mother’s cheap and easy distortions. She herself, given a ...”

“... for much of the time – like the man in the Fleet Street pub who was accosted by some American lady tourists asking whether this was the home of ‘your famous Dr Johnson’. He is alleged to have risen from his bar stool and replied: ‘Madam, I am Dr Johnson, so fuck off.’ At least Mr Wharton acknowledges the most significant peculiarity of the story ...”

“... neglect of pressing social problems by all duly constituted authorities. Here the body of Nemo, Lady Dedlock’s former lover and Esther Summerson’s father, is shoved into a fetid, corpse-filled ditch, only to fester into the source of the infection which strikes Jo and Lady Dedlock dead and scars Esther permanently. In ...”

“... appointment of professors.’ This turns out, however, to be a double-bluff, setting up the Iron Lady as a straw woman, only to have her high ferric valency confirmed by analysis. No whodunit, this book belongs in another popular genre which has taken up an awful lot of shelf-space in recent years – the shedunit. Margaret Thatcher’s paramountcy remains ...”

“... of his relatives might have known some of mine came last year from a cousin of Leonid’s, an old lady called Revekka who remembers meeting one of my great-uncles in Moscow in the late Twenties. My great-uncle was by then an American and very rich. Revekka’s mother, who was very poor, hoped that if the rich American saw her young daughter, he would give her ...”

“... until 1942, two years after the death of Chamberlain, and he was never a Conservative Whip. Lady Byron did not have a brother who died in 1815. After fifteen years of marriage, Sir Ralph and Lady Milbanke, having enjoyed, according to the latter’s aunt, better health, unexpectedly had a daughter Annabella, who was ...”

“... these lines. Lawrence himself, oddly enough, would not qualify; certainly not in the context of Lady Chatterley. One of the many not quite right things about that novel is the way Lawrence tries to distance sexual excitement from himself and his readers, making it a matter of the higher impulse: the feel in the blood and not the sex in the head. Being, in ...”

“... idea that I will do Defence Procurement under that man is OUT,’ he wrote. ‘And I will give the lady my reasons. I’d really rather be back on the estate.’ An upper-class Englishman was giving his view of having to work in a junior capacity for a career politician whom any decent castle-owner could spot at once was a ‘wanker’. As always, he was true ...”

“... the knighthood, the Order of Merit, the honorary degrees faithfully chronicled on the title-pages (Lady Frazer would surely have pounced on any omission). It all seems like a copious burial hoard among which – somewhere – Frazer himself unobtrusively lies. Mr Ackerman has set himself the task of excavation. The site is relatively untouched; the only ...”