“... to Catholicism. They included Thomas Harding, a one-time ardent evangelical, and chaplain to Lady Jane Grey’s father. Harding’s much publicised return to Catholicism at the end of 1553 elicited from Lady Jane a bitter tirade as she awaited execution in the Tower, for having become so soon the ‘vnshamefast ...”

“... describing ‘Our Mrs Parker’ in a 1933 Cosmopolitan profile as ‘a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth’. Other friends and frenemies riffed on the theme. Corey Ford opted for animal imagery: Parker was ‘a demure little lady with the tongue of an adder’, a kitten whose ‘sheathed claws were ...”

“... and he started to strip them of leaves and thorns. ‘I am standing at the door here. I see the lady cross. I know her. Often I see her. Always with the children. This time I see her cross the road and the other lady wait with the children. Then, I see the child, the little girl: she calls – and runs. The mother turns ...”

“... of draping paintings may explain the mysterious appearance made by fabric in a portrait of a lady by Bronzino (here miscaptioned as being by Mazzola-Bedoli). A mass of almost transparent silk hangs down beside the sitter on one side and is piled upwards on the other. Thornton describes this as a canopy, but if so, it is a very odd one. He suggests that ...”

“... of much time spent quietly and usefully. ‘A man cannot hem a pocket-handkerchief,’ a ‘lady of quality’ said to Samuel Johnson one day, ‘and so he runs mad, and torments his family and friends.’ The anecdote is recounted by Mrs Thrale. Johnson, it appears, was much impressed and, in Mrs Thrale’s telling, ‘when one acquaintance grew ...”

“... doubly revealing in its deliberate exaggeration, to social distinctions. Calves, as the lady remarked to the commoner, are a question of ...”

“... start?”’) Fitzgerald also surely owed something to E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady appeared in Time and Tide in the 1930s and whose ‘Robert’ is similarly laconic, impassive and discouraging. This fairly benign fiction, created perhaps as much for herself as for her daughters, concealed the painful truth that Desmond drank too ...”

“... found Master Cromwell leaning in the great window, with a primer in his hand, saying Our Lady Matins, which since had been a strange sight. He prayed not more earnestly than the tears distilled from his eyes; whom I bade goodmorrow. And with that I perceived the tears upon his cheeks.’ It is a supremely artful description, making it look for a ...”

“... eccentric judgments sound like received wisdom. In his account of Hoggart’s star turn in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial in 1960 – Penguin had been charged under the Obscene Publications Act for putting out an unexpurgated edition of Lawrence’s novel – Inglis dwells predictably on the Establishment snobbery personified by the prosecuting ...”

“... not only Hobson, but Albany, the Johnsonian style, even herself. When the frivolous but delightful Lady Honoria, in the same novel, makes fun of the hero as a mother’s boy, are we hearing Fanny Burney in impartial mood, observing both sides with equal amusement, or, as Professor Doody would have it, being given a disguised but unmistakable hint that the hero ...”

“... to try the market again. I have only ever read one such work, the continuation of Sanditon by ‘a Lady’ published some years ago; the bitter taste still lingers on, and I have a grudging sense that Jane Fairfax may not be quite as thin a dish of gruel as that. Instead it has an unappealing, mixed-up wrongness of flavour. It wants to be both like Jane Austen ...”

“... innocent. Here and in Bram Stoker, but in not too many other Dracula movies, he brings his undead lady companions a live baby for supper. What the movie suggests at its best is that we are in a world of the mind, and that a romantic reading of this ghastly myth is at least possible. What appear to be tricks are mostly contributions to this theme. We see pages ...”

“... why sexual imagery became so constant a theme of attacks on idols. Thomas Bilney denounced Our Lady of Willesden as a ‘common bawd’, and Zwingli complained of the image of St Barbara, ‘got up fine like a prostitute’. The image of the Whore of Babylon, the Romish strumpet, painted in new ways to make her more lovely, allowed a rich proliferation of ...”

“... which has been construed as revealing masochistic proclivities in which he had either involved the lady or sought to do so. The supplementary evidence of the padlock and fetters finds a simple explanation in Johnson’s fear of madness, and the thought that he might need to be restrained: not so much a skeleton in the cupboard as a straitjacket in the ...”

“... Ford, who encouraged and supervised her urge to become a writer. Stella Benson, Ford’s current lady, tried and failed to put her foot down but put a finger on the source of Jean’s power and appeal, in her writing as in her life: ‘Here was I cast for the role of the fortunate wife who held all the cards, and she for that of the poor, brave and desperate ...”