“... 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 ...”

“... suggests identification as well as ironic distance between Sidney and Astrophil. Sidney’s niece Lady Mary Wroth retold fictional versions of her unhappy marriage and her adulterous affair with her cousin over and over again in both the framing and inset narratives of her prose romance Urania. Admittedly, none of these was a writer for the public stage ...”

“... to be regretted; no novelist of the present time has a title to such public commendation as that lady; Her characters are drawn with originality of Design, & strength of Colouring, & her Morality is of the purest & most elevated sort.’ At times like these, Burney’s anxiety, even panic, revived the trauma of the publication of Evelina, when her attempt to ...”

“... Rights, the philosophy of non-violence and the inherent dignity of humankind. Popham, whose The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi chronicled her life until 2010 in admiring tones, is now less generous. He writes that since being released from house arrest late in 2010, she ‘has become an object lesson in the slipperiness of the concept of ...”

“... in January 1560. The next 13 years of her life were spent at the Spanish court, first as lady-in-waiting to the queen; then, after her death in 1568, in the households of her young daughters, the infantas Isabella Clara Eugenia and Catalina Micaela, and of the new queen, Anna of Austria. But exactly what Sofonisba did in Spain remains a matter of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... England as a country (not the country) of her own. The Furies can be read as another Portrait of a Lady, the representation of a young woman essentially on her own coping with the experience of existing in divided and distinguished worlds. Hobhouse’s Helen, like James’s Isabel Archer, is perpetually an alien. But there are big differences from the James ...”

“... of the fictional structure, this woman becomes, in the book, Lena von Pussel, a German lady intimate with Elgar in distant days when they were both aspiring musicians, but now, at the time of the narrative, resident in Brazil. We are encouraged to believe that she is the hidden subject of the 13th Enigma Variation, and that consequently the letters ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the Mellor affair. The excuse offered by the People’s editor – that Mr Mellor had told his lady friend that their nocturnal encounters were making him too tired to write his speeches, and that this made the story a legitimate matter of public interest – is frankly ludicrous. If that were the case, it would not just be the right but the duty of every ...”

“... Beaverbrook died the newspapers passed – with unfortunate results – to his formidable widow, Lady Beaverbrook, and to his son, Sir Max Aitken. The reader will have spotted that even in my fantasies I harboured no prissy ideas about editorial independence. My vision of owning a newspaper was that it would say what I wanted it to say about the great issues ...”