“... century than one has any right to expect ... the prioress clearly wants to be thought more of a lady than she is, and the franklin – a rich farmer in whose house it “snowed with meat and drink” – is eager that everyone should know what trouble he is taking to educate his son as a gentleman. These social pretensions, these subtly differentiated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are absolutely at home with her disrupted deeps, mingling with them as freely as a society lady with lushes and misfits at a cocktail party. This is shown in a specially graphic way by what must remain her masterpiece, though she always hated hearing it referred to as such, The Death of the Heart. The young Eddie and the 16-year-old Portia live darkly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a medical questionnaire to all the women who had attended Newnham and Girton in Cambridge, and Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville in Oxford. They were asked to assess their state of health on a scale from ‘excellent’ to ‘dead’ (some forms were necessarily completed by the families of those who had not survived) at different periods of their ...”

“... for the Northwest Passage in the 1840s only further fuelled the imaginative drama of the ice. Lady Jane Franklin, reminding the nation of her husband’s heroism with her own heroic bearing, whipped up sympathy and money for years of searching which finally located the bodies of the party – though not the remains of Franklin himself. But the drama of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... father had died in 1660). He agreed, and remarked in his diary on ‘this Miracle of a young Lady in a licentious Court & so deprav’d an age’. Evelyn drew an altar with a heart on it and a pentacle beneath it, and Margaret inscribed it: ‘Be this the symbol of inviolable friendship.’ Before long he was referring to Margaret in his diary simply by ...”

“... on them, literally kissing Rayburn’s bald head, endlessly inviting them round so that his wife, Lady Bird, could give them good ole Southern cooking and rescue them from the loneliness they dreaded. ‘Loneliness breaks the heart,’ Rayburn used to say, ‘loneliness consumes people.’ With Rayburn and Russell as a base, LBJ built up his position in the ...”

“... to take her up. Vanity Fair gushed in 1877: ‘All male London is going wild about the Beautiful Lady who has come to us from the Channel Islands ... She has a husband to make her happy, but still awaits a poet to make her known.’ Her husband most certainly did not make her happy, but Oscar Wilde volunteered for the poet’s position and spent a night ...”