“... 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 ...”

“... who occupied the cradles in the portego?’ Fortini Brown asks. ‘Like any well-brought-up lady, she seems to have practised needlework, for the inventory lists a spinning wheel.’ The familiarity here discourages the scepticism that historians should foster. And how do we know that she herself tended to her babies? When we peer through a window, we ...”

“... liberating from domestic drudgery and the guilt that comes of avoiding it than having a cleaning lady who loves cleaning, a child-carer who’s content with child-care, a homebody who wants nothing more than to be at home. And Martha Freud was all those things. Quite why she was those things is something that her husband might have been the very person to ...”

“... a Hollywood star, then a hard-drinking rabble-rouser, and finally a grand and rather sad old lady with a corgi and a maid living in one of those sadly grand houses in Knightsbridge. In between, she made some pictures. I read a large proportion of this book on a train, sitting opposite a woman immersed in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective ...”

“... has a young daughter of her own. In One for My Baby Alfie’s new love, Jackie Day, is a feisty lady down on her luck – she’s a cleaner. In Man and Boy Harry’s new love, Cyd, was also a feisty lady down on her luck – she was a waitress. In both novels Harry/Alfie is assaulted by the ex-boyfriend, and in both cases ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and any lessons learned from past misjudgments will be invaluable. Often referred to as ‘The Lady’ by her supporters, Suu Kyi, who was born in 1945, is the daughter of the murdered independence leader and army chief Aung San. This helps account for the Burmese people’s devotion to her: why they flock to her speeches and keep small photos of her ...”

“... When we explain how the city works to visitors, we always tell them this story. An eighty-year-old lady who lived alone was not in good health. One day, the water meter, electricity meter and gas meter in the old lady’s apartment hadn’t moved for 24 hours. The computing platform sent an alert to our staff, who contacted ...”

“... letters home on the soldiers’ behalf, soliciting their needs (and occasionally those of ‘lady-nurses’). Among the requests:D.S.G., bed 52, wants a good book; has a sore, weak throat; would like some horehound candy; is from New Jersey, 28th regiment. C.H.L., 145th Pennsylvania, lies in bed 6, with jaundice and erysipelas; also wounded; stomach ...”

“... chimneysweep having his teeth pulled out for transplantation into the mouth of a fashionable lady, in exchange for a coin or two. Sugar from the colonies rotted the teeth, and live transplantation from the younger and more expendable was mooted as one solution, though the procedure usually failed.While Rowlandson invoked the contrast between the vain ...”

“... thought that the ‘gist’ of it was much the same as that of Swinburne’s ‘Dolores’ (‘Our Lady of Pain’). This was thought ridiculous, but was it? Laura has given way and gorged herself. She is sick unto death and knows that only more of the pernicious juice will cure her, but she is permitted to buy it only once. Lizzie has to brave the ...”

“... The frame yawns to a living-room. Slim Whitman warbles through the hum of a bad earth. The Green Lady cries over the scene: you, compromised, steadily drawing out the juice of the one man you could not seduce, but his legs are sliding up his shorts, his mouth drops open in its slot and at the point you suss his groans come not from his throat, but your ...”

“... of the details of Susan’s daily life are borrowed from Dorothy Parker’s Diary of a New York Lady, written in the Forties and subtitled ‘During Days of Horror, Despair and World Change’. Parker’s empty-headed, self-centred diarist has a marriage on the rocks (‘Joe left word with the butler he’s going to the country this afternoon for the ...”

“... hero’s elevation to the Captaincy of his House, to the sheer and tasteless perversity of ...”