“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Robert​ Reed became president of the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 13 January 2020, succeeding Lady Hale. By the end of 2021, the Supreme Court had produced 111 judgments since his appointment, 53 in 2020 and 58 in 2021, with Lord Reed himself sitting in 56 of these cases. These decisions give us an opportunity to assess how his Supreme Court is performing in the current malign political atmosphere ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Picture of Dorian Gray), the theatre designer Percy Anderson, and ‘the Ranee of Sarawak’, Lady Margaret Brooke. He knew Wilde, and developed flirtatious friendships with the much older playwright and composer Hamilton Aïdé and with Henry James, who looked back wistfully years later on ‘something – ah, so tender! – in me that was only quite ...”

“... of his career rather than its reward. Although he conducted a clandestine affair with the Dowager Lady Sheffield ten years after Amy’s death, he dared not marry her, as an abject letter to her explained in appropriately tormented syntax: ‘If I should marry I am sure never to have favour of them that I had rather yet never have wife than lose them, yet is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in English history, the culmination of long-term plotting spearheaded by his formidable mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, the most successful politician in 15th-century England. Her role, largely forgotten for centuries and thrillingly rediscovered by Michael Jones and Malcolm Underwood in The King’s Mother (1992), might usefully have played a greater part ...”