“... to a bomb dropped on London in, precisely, 1940. By what he calls ‘a curious coincidence’ and Lady Bracknell would call carelessness, he lost both his parents, too, in the same raid, though to a separate bomb on a different part of London. By the time of the story’s action he is an expatriate, living and working – for a chocolate firm – in ...”

“... home opinion would be slow to stir on such a matter. But the test of marriage was whether the lady would be acceptable at the dinner tables of Camberley. It was the closer and more frequent contact with middle-class England through the steamer and furlough that progressively raised the sex barrier, not some mysterious mystique of empire. Two social groups ...”

“... backed with playing cards: sometimes the face of the card is left visible so a picture of a court lady or melancholy lover has a couple of hearts on the reverse – a little secret between the limner and his sitter.Hilliard’s standard fee for a portrait miniature was £3 (around £500 in modern money), though a fancy locket, jewelled setting or ivory case ...”

“... Village in the Highlands of Scotland’. In another tale from c.1793, Anna Parker, ‘a Young Lady, whose feelings being too strong for her Judgment led her into the commission of Errors which her Heart disapproved’, murders her father, mother and sister, perjures herself in court and forges her own will: ‘In short there is scarcely a crime that I ...”

“... transfer of power, and soon the death of Edward and the failed coup d’état in the name of Lady Jane Grey, followed by the successful coup and triumph of Elizabeth’s Catholic sister. The Protestant princess, seen as her father’s true daughter and ‘mere English’, was now at the centre of plots, and dabbling in treason herself, just like her ...”

“... in its default gentleman’s club mode likes nothing more than chuntering on about the perils of a Lady Macbeth. (Elspeth Howe waited 15 years to extract her revenge, helping her husband write the resignation speech that triggered Thatcher’s demise.) The great advantage when Lady Macbeth takes the reins herself is that no ...”

“... alert to its own power. For as long as I thought polite, I looked at these drawings, remembering Lady Gregory’s remark that, since John Butler Yeats had so much difficulty finishing paintings, he should be encouraged to do as many drawings as possible, drawings that could be done in one sitting. As I turned, my eye was caught by an oil painting hanging on ...”

“... 1981 to 1984. ‘The Residents were a delightful and happy group of ladies,’ he says, ‘each lady presented as a unique individual, with a unique personality, well able to ask relevant questions and to express her opinion and, above all, ready and willing to gossip, to tease and be teased and to joke.’ And perhaps it is true. Irish women are often ...”

“... until I got a voluntary job. A woman called Margaret worked at Oxfam. I didn’t ask her about the lady who was at that time about to depart from Number 10. Surely now my agony was over and John Major would say: ‘Let’s forget the war.’ He would sack me and stop Radio 4 from tuning into my mind at lunchtime every day for the World at One. Reagan was long ...”

“... she was determined to avoid the ‘slop and sentimentalism’ she associated with the role of a ‘lady-novelist’. Her first sustained prose writings – she thought of herself, then and later, primarily as a poet – were works of what we’d now call feminist literary history. But to be put in any subcategory was always vaguely affronting. Her horror of ...”

“... To be recognised and praised by James, whose early ‘Daisy Miller’ and The Portrait of a Lady she had long admired, set the seal on her success in this evasion: but there was a price to be paid, that of submission to the Jamesian codes, an acceptance of his rank. She addressed him as Cher Maître, and the genuine affection of Cher could not ...”

“... to have provided more than a personal sketch. He acknowledges his ‘greatest debt’ to Lord and Lady Denning for their patience and kindness in helping him, and the ‘sketch’ is on the whole adulatory. Heward does, however, put the other side, saying of Denning: ‘A serious criticism of him is that he lacked intellectual honesty; this certainly took ...”

“... remained undecorated, a spell in Canada as ADC to the Governor-General and marriage to Lady Dorothy Cavendish, Macmillan became MP for Stockton in 1924. The high unemployment in the North-East between the wars, with its attendant misery, affected Macmillan all his life. He tried hard at the time to improve conditions there and resolved that they ...”

“... in whose house at Deptford Strand Marlowe was killed. The evidence increasingly suggests she was a lady of some substance. She was the widow of a minor official at nearby Deptford Manor, cousin of one of the Queen’s gentlewomen, Blanche Parry, and perhaps distantly related to Lord Burghley himself. As Urry says, this finally dissipates the romance image of ...”

“... an early French draft, the Enlightenment’s version, of what would become James’s Portrait of a Lady. It is a novel about the adventures of the intelligence – as distinct from the conscience or the will – in a world which fears intelligence above all things. Mina Wanghen is a rich Prussian heiress of the 1830s, 18 years old, romantic in spirit, inclined ...”