“... did it repeatedly. They were showing off for the journalists, and clearly trying to wind up the lady officer. A man from the Mail on Sunday walked round and round the Close, chapping on all the doors, getting himself steamed up. Every time he heard something interesting – and often when he heard something not – he’d draw out his mobile phone and call ...”

“... reputation have fluctuated so dramatically since his death. To be sure, the embattled author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not alone among High Modernists in having been labelled a proto-fascist reactionary, a racist, a misogynist, an élitist and (no doubt in a range of other formulations I’m not remembering at the moment) a paradigmatic Bad Boy. And ...”

“... response towards not pity or empathy but horror – hence the affinity with Jacobean drama. When Lady Macbeth says she would have plucked the nipple from her infant’s mouth and dashed his brains out, she is remembering Seneca’s Medea – the couple are childless, after all, as Macbeth’s obsession with his future lineage makes plain (there is no ...”

“... most prominent leaders – Millicent Garrett Fawcett, widow of a Liberal government minister, and Lady Frances Balfour, daughter of the Whig Duke of Argyll and sister-in-law of the Conservative politician and later prime minister A.J. Balfour – had both left the Liberal Party over its embrace of Irish Home Rule. Throughout the late Victorian period, the ...”

“... it’s the corner of Kenilworth Road and Gibbet Hill Road to the south of the university, and the lady sitting on the bench in the background must be waiting for a bus to take her into Coventry. Maybe she’s off shopping, or going to Coventry Market. We’re in a complex, long-established, urban economy here. And the sign isn’t to some vague place called ...”

“... it features as The Revelations of Chaos, Disraeli parodied both Vestiges and the craze it started. Lady Constance comes away, as many readers did, with a general impression that it explains everything and nothing:what is most interesting, is the way in which man has been developed. You know, all is development. The principle is perpetually going ...”

“... baron is tricked into marrying a local gardener’s daughter in the belief that she is a young lady of quality with jewels and a great fortune; the debts the girl incurs to Sally in getting herself ‘Rigg’d handsomely’ for the role are passed on to her new husband; and he ends up ‘in a Starving Condition’ in the Fleet Prison.These inversions ...”

“... troubled even so ardent a royalist. The worst of these was the notorious Essex divorce case, when Lady Frances Howard, favourite of James I, sought an annulment of her childhood marriage to the Earl of Essex, to marry another royal favourite, Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester. The lurid case involved spectacular bedroom revelations, allegations of ...”

“... really a music-hall starlet known as the Beautiful Belle Burgess? Biswell kindly remarks that no lady of that name appears on any of the playbills he’s examined. There are at least some facts about Burgess that are known and that matter to his writing. He was baptised a Catholic as John Burgess Wilson in Manchester in 1917, the offspring of a mother who ...”

“... many affairs with servants, actresses and duchesses, culminating in the debacle with the unstable Lady Caroline Lamb and his ‘incestuous’ relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. He was well known as a ‘regency rake’ and a virulent anti-Tory in the House of Lords, a combination barely imaginable now. He was an admirer of the French Revolution ...”

“... Kessler dined with her almost weekly during the 1890s. Kessler had no idea that the ‘fat old lady’ at whose table he dined was watching him, but she saw his cult of art clearly – he was a member of what she called the ‘Wagner church’ – and found it uncomfortable. She wrote of a lunch at his flat in Berlin in March 1900: ‘He lives at 28 ...”

“... win the Great Doncaster St Leger, Mr Gully’s bay colt Frankenstein (by Young Phantom, out of My Lady) failed to live up to expectations. Beaten into fourth place at the York Spring Meeting by Muley Moloch, Satan and Lot, in October Frankenstein, by now renamed Deceiver, finished last but two in the worst St Leger the Sporting Magazine’s correspondent had ...”

“... gently but firmly, for something I’d written half a lifetime previously about Delacroix’s Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking. ‘I think the drawing in it is quite marvellous,’ he said, ‘and Delacroix’s drawing in general comes to seem better and better the older I get. And the pose of Lady Macbeth’s arm reaching ...”

“... places of the town In which he whilom hadde al his plesaunce. ‘Lo, yonder saugh ich last my lady daunce; And in that temple, with hire eyen cleere, Me kaughte first my righte lady dere.’Having tried all these means of re-inventing her, he turns to narrative: Thanne thoughte he thus: ‘O blisful lord Cupide, Whan I ...”