“... legends in a distant, perhaps too jocular manner, but suddenly breaks into her ghost story about a Lady Wynne of Tudor times with the stark information that she herself, when pregnant, lost her child in the same way that Lady Wynne had done. She is terse and stoical again when reporting the death of her young son, merely ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... face. In January 1994 the Home Secretary received a protest from a visitor to the prison, Lady Olga Maitland, about these shenanigans. ‘Lady Olga didn’t mention security,’ he observed. ‘She didn’t mention any of the things we subsequently discovered went on.’ Howard is not a man who recognises the tip of ...”

“... say that the look of plain texts does not carry information which has nothing to do with content. Lady Chatterley was prosecuted because she was to be dressed in paperback, and Quakerish simplicity makes one supersensitive to the detail of margins, type and paper. Strong feelings can be raised by these matters, as they can by an inch or two on the length of a ...”

“... arbitrary, skirmishing with enemies who have long since vanished, condescending to the views of ‘lady students’, and assuming a virtually direct access both to the mind of the maker and to the responses of the original audience. The hitherto unpublished pieces – a letter to a colleague who had ventured to disagree on a point of interpretation, an unfair ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for example, interesting as the novel’s relation to the historical ill-doings of Lord and Lady Grey, Lady Henrietta Berkeley et al may be, gets hopelessly sidetracked in speculations about the covert political schemes of Lord Sunderland. Similarly, Todd’s account of Oroonoko devotes far too much time to qualifying ...”

“... developments. Marcus draws attention to the battle of the sexes: Comus’s seduction speech to the lady could almost be a conscious reworking and critique of ‘Corinna’s going a maying’. Milton sees that the traditional phallicism of the rustic revels might not have been so agreeable to women concerned for their safety. These political readings of Comus ...”

“... she boomed, ‘that Mr Higham was able to find a reputable British publisher for his book.’ Lady Donaldson doesn’t believe for a moment that either the Duke or Duchess of Windsor were even pro-Nazi. She follows in a long line of biographers, historians and journalists who concede, since it is plainly on the record, that the Duke and Duchess were both ...”

“... the shadows cast on the road.’ Millais was enraptured. The more practical Wilkie raced after the lady. Up to now, all that was known about this woman in white was her name, Caroline Graves, that she became Collins’s mistress and inspired a melodramatic scene in his best-known novel. By careful inspection of Census returns and marriage certificates, Clarke ...”

“... whole’) in A Farewell to Arms, which were derived from Hemingway’s friend, Barklie Henry; even Lady Emerald Cunard remarking to Cyril Connolly that Hemingway struck her ‘as androgynous’. ‘You may think it bizarre of me.’ she added, ‘It is not the mot juste perhaps. But that is how he struck me.’ Bizarre no more. For if Lynn occasionally pushes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with stories (The Proscribed Royalist) and pictures from stories (Mariana). They were all famous. Lady Constance Leslie met Millais at the exhibition, head bowed. ‘Ah, Lady Constance,’ he said, ‘you see me unmanned. Well, I’m not ashamed to say that on looking at my earliest pictures I have been overcome with ...”

“... books or staging unexpected new plays anonymously. The revelation that he was the author of The Lady of Lyons proved so humiliating to the Times in 1838 that it retaliated with an attack which W.C Macready called ‘vulgar, virulent and impotent from its display of malice’. Bulwer-Lytton was thought too delicate for education at Eton, and was tutored at ...”