“... 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 ...”

“... as Oban. It’s here that we’re introduced to the sopranos of the fifth-year choir of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour’s School for Girls: the naturally aristocratic Fionnula (the Cooler); Orla, who is dying of Hodgkin’s disease and has undergone the traumas of radiotherapy and Lourdes; Chell, who adores animals; Manda, who lives with her father some ...”

“... by domestic objects. Sometimes they are reading, as in her two paintings of the early 1910s, A Lady Reading and Girl Reading at the Window (Quinn’s first acquisition). The lady has a face like ‘a vierge of Dürer’, John said; the girl has John’s own face. Sometimes her women hold a piece of sewing, or a cat. The ...”

“... began indeed as a writer, under the name not of Ernest Jones but of ‘Karl’. He was taken up by Lady Stepney, an elderly novelist of society, whose husband had held a place at the perpetual whist-playing, dog-and-monkey-cluttered but amiable court of the Duke of York. Through her, he found a publisher for his first novel, The Wood Sprite, in which a former ...”

“... watch, he is pardoned and not hanged by the neck for the murder he didn’t commit. The inevitable Lady Mary exhibits her spoiled nature and then learns her lesson several times in each season, and the irredeemably wicked footman and his spiteful lady’s maid accomplice get their comeuppance and revert to type so frequently ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the size of the carrier; a fair comparison would be a five-coach train carrying one old lady to the seaside. Though the people of England saw little or nothing of the October rout, they had already witnessed zeppelins blazing like bonfires in the night sky. Bertrand Russell, spending his first night with a new mistress, was roused by ‘a bestial ...”

“... was sent to work as a servant, to teach her humility, but rebelled on the grounds that she was a lady. After many setbacks Maynard wondered whether the girl suffered from ‘moral idiocy’, blameable perhaps on that Italian streak in her parentage. Sent to an orphan-training school, Effie was found in bed teaching other girls ‘filthy and disgusting ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... schools in the US, including Vassar and Sarah Lawrence, meanwhile, began to admit men, as did Lady Margaret Hall and St Anne’s in Oxford, and Girton in Cambridge. In an extraordinarily short space of time, coeducation had ceased to be a distant possibility and was in widespread operation. One obvious explanation for the speed with which single-sex ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that at Coke’s funeral ‘there was much pomp, and a long procession which included his wife, Lady Hatton, with whom he regularly fought, and at the end she said We shall not see his like again, thanks be to God.’It certainly took me in. I first heard the story about Lady Hatton’s parting shot many years ago, but ...”

“... by John Michael Wright’s c.1668 painting of James Cecil, fourth Earl of Salisbury and his sister Lady Catherine, now at Hatfield. Unhelpfully, there is no indication on the canvas as to the pear-bearing girl’s identity, and no date either. However, a modern brass plaque affixed to the frame confidently supplies the former, and suggests by implication a ...”