“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from predatory hands by turning into nymphs or water lilies or salmon. You, too, can play the Lady of Shalott. Pond etiquette circumscribes photography – this isn’t a place to be Instagrammed, except covertly – but its recent popularity reflects its cultural cachet, both as wellness chic (improve your immunity!) and as a pillar of urban middle-class ...”

“... by Paul and Millicent Dillon after Jane’s death) in a section headed ‘The Third Serious Lady’. The new volume offers brief notes explaining the publication history of the pieces, including one identifying ‘A Guatemalan Idyll’ as the original beginning of ‘Three Serious Ladies’. This conjures up a very different kind of book, much looser in ...”

“... I sneered, ‘Piper is the acceptable face of modern art,’ not realising that at that moment the lady herself was passing through the room behind me. Some of his abstracts I like, particularly a collage, Coast at Finisterre (1961), which is illustrated in the book, and some of his Welsh landscapes. I don’t care for his stained glass, though churches are ...”

“... Indépendants. Wild horses could not have kept them away. A bold pair, armed with a letter from Lady Sackville or Isabella Stewart Gardner, might have penetrated Rodin’s studio. His bronze statue of Balzac in a dressing-gown, shown at the Salon des Beaux Arts, would already have led the travellers to take sides, some finding it disgusting and ...”

“... would be nice if the Lord sent another flood and drowned the world,’ he wrote to Lady Ottoline. This is the sum of Carey’s quotation. But Lawrence’s letter continues: ‘Probably I should want to be Noah. I am not sure,’ which is funny and human and fallen – not that Carey would have been amused. Lawrence’s comedy emerges in his ...”

“... are due to improvements suggested by Mr Aspinall. It has been altogether a happy experience.’ ‘Lady Sarah Aspinall has shown exemplary patience with my intrusions, for which I am most grateful ...’ ‘In addition,’ Mr Masters writes, ‘there have been a great number of people who have been willing to share their reminiscences with me, and I trust they ...”

“... with psychoanalytic theory will recognise connections with the patient’s attitude towards the lady ... and to his mother who was condemned because of her money.’ No doubt it makes Hopkins feel quite grownup to go on in this way, but what is its point? Just what does the money-excrement equation explain? Ernest Jones thought it explained why Britain went ...”

“... and despite his attainment and adornment of the influential circle at Holland House. Lord and Lady Holland are evoked in the adjuration: ‘think of his possessing Holland House, and that he reposes every evening on that beautiful structure of flesh and blood Lady H.’ But his longing for preferment, which supplies ...”

“... house, Bells, nearest post-office Thudeney-Blazes, tries the strength of the sensible grand lady who inherits it. ‘ “Fudge!” muttered Lady Jane,’ who is ‘interested in old houses’ and in travel, like Wharton herself, and who finds out that a Regency ancestor has ill-treated his deaf-and-dumb wife, and ...”