“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... again not just on his own testimony) to have evolved quite a relationship with the First Lady. It had, indeed, been Hillary’s idea to get Morris back on the team after Clinton’s reverse in Arkansas in 1979. She it was who snatched up the phone and made that cheap pager vibrate its thrilling summons. ‘Bill needs you right now,’ she breathed. I ...”

“... Even old loyalties turned a bit sceptical. In her Memories of George Meredith one of his fans, Lady Butcher, recalled how he had thrilled her with his first inspiration for One of Our Conquerors, as they walked together on Box Hill. As I listened to his wonderful voice telling of the tragic history of Nathalie and the dawning wonder of Nesta, I thought it ...”

“... to do that, but finally agrees to place the child in Paley’s lap. A white man says to her: ‘Lady, I wouldn’t of touched that thing with a meat hook.’ Paley loves America, and was brought up to celebrate its difference from dark old pogrom-stained Europe. But it is full of terrible remembrances for her, and that is precisely what she calls this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... accounts given by sitters, to have started with a detailed drawing on the canvas in black chalk. Lady Elizabeth Leveson-Gower thought it ‘almost a sin’ to see it disappear below the paint. He was self-taught and it was drawing, not painting, that brought the child prodigy to the attention of his father’s patrons in the Black Bear, a coaching inn on the ...”

“... quietly grateful for all the help these ladies are not giving. In the last of these scenes, the lady – the office, the judge, the system – offers nothing, not even the pretence of having tried to do something. Sibil sits back and smiles, saying that she is amazed people can treat other human beings like this. Her smile continues, expressing an ...”

“... 1963 photograph by Malick Sidibé of a couple dancing but has Miró-like passages. In Confession (Lady Chancellor) a long, purple, red-headed nude with scarlet nails reaches for a drink tendered by a black hand emerging from a white cuff that enters the picture at the top left-hand corner. Her feet and toes stretch out like roots to meet Art Nouveau at its ...”

“... this one does, naturally peel back to give a view in which, despite the implied informality (the lady having her hair dressed, the gentleman playing cards, the baby in its governess’s arms), the protagonists are as neatly and hierarchically spaced out as people in a formal wedding group. One accepts the oddity of the situation the composition ...”

“... by all for a hero and wins out every time, couldn’t fail to be a smart move. Flashman’s Lady is a good ten thousand places ahead of the most popular edition of Tom Brown’s Schooldays in the Amazon league, despite being five times the price. Here is a fullish description of the ‘cowardly brute’ from Thomas Hughes: Flashman, be it said, was ...”

“... Pete Robinson was a 65-pound ‘human skeleton’. Olga Roderick … was a traditional bearded lady, and Koo Koo (‘the bird girl from Mars’) appeared to be the victim of progeria, a rare disease that causes rapid and premature ageing.As Browning assembled his actors, he discovered that they were as entitled as any other group of stars. It didn’t ...”