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“... 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 ...”

“... and excitable with little power of sustained action in any direction’. His governess, Lady Lyttelton, lamented his ‘passions and stampings’ and inclination to hurl his books and sit under the table. Victoria and Albert’s solution was a heavily timetabled regime, modelled on Albert’s own German education. From the age of six, every ...”

“... a girl in Munich who saw her in the street one day and ran home to tell her parents she had seen a lady as beautiful as a fairy, to which her father immediately replied: ‘That must have been Lola Montez.’ Admirers mentioned her air of refinement, her tapered fingers and white hands, her duchessy way of carrying herself. The Morning Post praised her ...”

“... in Order and Disorder; the title page could have said ‘By a Person of Quality’ or ‘By a Lady’ or some such; the preface could have carried initials or even a signature. Norbrook asks: ‘Why … did she not put her name proudly on the title page, like her contemporaries Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips?’ In fact, the only one ...”

“... waited to get clearance from the quarantine authorities, he noticed on shore ‘a sweet English Lady’, and wondered ‘how straggled that angel Face hither?’ The next day he disembarked, and was enthralled by the variety and appearance of the inhabitants: ‘dirty’ Spaniards, Greek women with huge ear rings, ‘Jews with university Bumbazine ...”

“... Own Double-Entry. For Johnson’s first novel, Travelling People, and his last, See the Old Lady Decently, one had best try Amazon. Coe describes Travelling People as concealing under ‘a veneer of stylistic adventurousness . . . a conventional enough Bildungsroman’ which mingles fiction and autobiography in a manner Johnson soon came to ...”