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“... the future tense of the verbs.’ The language lessons were deemed advisable in that the lucky lady was a Miss Anna Eyre Powell, whose father owned land in both Ireland and England: ‘a girl who is a dream from Ossian,’ Villiers wrote to Judith Gautier. After an exchange of letters Villiers took himself off to England, staying at the Grosvenor Hotel in ...”

“... as an escort. Instead, she resolved to maintain the Palatine court-in-exile, admitting to a former lady-in-waiting her surprise at the turn of events that had seen her ‘become a stateswoman, which of all things I have ever hated’. In her quest to secure Palatine restitution, Elizabeth attracted unswerving devotion from an older generation of ...”

“... baby’s father was charged but never stood trial.) Prison visits by upper-middle-class lady well-wishers, following Elizabeth Fry’s example, aimed to save the inmates from themselves: the Lady Visitors’ Association, founded in 1901 and active at Holloway, was ‘a body of earnest and devoted ladies with ...”

“... Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners. She looks like a nicely brought up young lady, with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ part of her vocabulary. But in her first official portrait by Paul Emsley, unveiled in January, her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off. One ...”

“... took a spongebag, Hermione Lee reports, to the Booker dinner. In her letters she uses the dotty-lady schtick for two main purposes. It’s there to entertain and mollify her daughters, on whom she depended for all sorts of things: ‘Marina Warner came to lecture at the Highgate Institute on Tues – embarrassing as the members had made a clean sweep of all ...”

“... and failing to get published the manuscript of a novel, tellingly titled The Poor Man and the Lady. He wrote in his notebook, in October 1870: ‘Mother’s notion, & also mine: That a figure stands in our van with arm uplifted, to knock us back from any pleasant prospect we indulge in as probable.’ Nowadays, we read this metaphysically, in the ...”

“... little, as with the story of the liaison with Lola Montès, but it is pleasant to learn about the lady who announced her readiness to spend the night with Dumas on condition that he would first present her with a mongoose and an ant-eater (the former was not difficult, but where, asks Professor Hemmings, was Dumas to get hold of an ant-eater, short of ...”

“... compassion, or from some interested and unworthy motive. We are asked – ‘Why should not such a lady dance, if it gives her pleasure?’ We answer – ‘It should not give her ...”

“... beside the point – and Reed’s Night Train to Munich (1940) is a sort of ironic remake of The Lady Vanishes, complete with Margaret Lockwood and Naunton Wayne – but Hitchcock is interested in the nightmare of error rather than the death of charity. The Fallen Idol seems a little dated on a new viewing, its images and plot-points signalled too bluntly ...”

“... the pretensions and self-deceptions of those who practised it. St Louis was crawling with would-be lady writers. There was Mrs Stone, the director of the Modern Novel Club, who had written a pamphlet on ‘The Problem of Domestic Service’: ‘Intentions pile up before her like a mountain, and the sum of her energies is Zero!’ Mrs Hull, the wife of a coal ...”

“... and Princess: ‘Arbella Stuart’s notorious rebellion offered the example of yet another royal lady challenging James’s patriarchal and absolutist claims. Never mind that Arbella’s rebellion challenged the interests and claims of the Queen and Princess as well. The suppression of comparisons and distinctions between the women makes each chapter seem ...”

“... prepared in this Town & shall be sent by the [ship] Caesar Templer … My best respects attend ye Lady Shaftesburys.’ That July he sent word that he had also shipped ‘one thousand of Shells in the Happy Return, consigned to Mr Julian Beckford for your use, which I hope safe to hand & that they may answer.’I assume that the shells ...”

“... go on with the show. This is generally seen as a heroic gesture, in line with the legend of lady-like sanctity that has grown up around Grenfell’s memory, but to me it sounds unattractively bossy, in the worst manner of Edwina Currie. To be forbidden to eat sweets in the theatre is surely an encroachment on civil liberties ... I prefer the kind of ...”

“... Carey’s excremental vision (here’s mud in your eye) gets blurred: ‘Cracking-packing like a lady’. Not much of a wise-cack. Can anything be trusted? Perhaps Anon (it is hard to check) really ended his ‘Ancient Mariner’ with the lines A sadder and later man     I rose the morrow morn, but it would have been wiser of her or him not perversely ...”

“... he was examining the records of Zululand in 1881 that he came across a most improbable figure, Lady Florence Dixie, a reporter from the Morning Post. She is the key to this book, in the sense that it treats Late Victorian England as if it were an extension of the Dark Continent, wreathed in tribal loyalties and ritualised codes, made more vivid still by ...”