“... 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 ...”

“... other households in Gordon Square, remembered Mrs Woolf as ‘lovely … always sort of the grand lady’ and gave the most succinct summing-up of her relationship with her former cook; Nellie, she said, was ‘a bit highly strung’ and ‘Virginia Woolf was’ too. Despite Light’s efforts, Nellie struggles to emerge as a rounded personality rather than ...”

“... It is almost certain that if Trump is elected, Melania Trump will be the first First Lady to have posed for softcore pornographic ‘girl on girl’ photos.African Americans and Jews Trump: ‘Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.’Women As ...”

“... a triple mirror, a mustard pot, a pearl necklace from ‘Grandpapa’, a cheque for £25 from Lady Brabourne, a tablecloth and more. She noted the date the presents were received and the names of the present-givers, from Lady Sligo to Nanny.One of the thoughts the book gives rise to is just how many belongings would ...”

“... knew he could afford to wait. By the early twenties he had got his hooks into that wealthy US lady and money trouble no longer bothered him. His main interest in life was acting the ballocks as grd. seigneuer [grand seigneur]. His jealousy of the patronage Joyce enjoyed is understandable, given his own financial situation. Still, the basis of the attack ...”