“... and burgers he has hogged. Is there a connection between Frank the Phone and the tall, red-haired lady in a veil who seems to be following him round town? If there is, Self can’t ever quite muster the mental energy to work it out. Nor does he have the wits to figure out the role of Doris Arthur, the feminist scriptwriter hired by Fielding to work on Good ...”

“... important – who chose food, clothes and furnishings ‘not without care but without taste’. Lady Strachey’s principled charmlessness seems to have extended to her way with words: Dorothy Strachey remembers a romance-shrivelling reading of Tom Jones and a lot of good talk which left the children edgy and bored. In recalling the infrequent interventions ...”

“... up to now this remarkable politician’s appearances on television have been like those of Our Lady of Lourdes in the Pyrenees. We know that both he and She show themselves from time to time, and that they are potentially able to work miracles. But no one can actually think of a major, sustained speech, illuminating the most urgent problems of our ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... against Thomas Seymour, the Lord Protector’s brother, and his marital designs on the 15-year-old Lady Elizabeth, the future (Protestant) queen. She is disliked by the Lord Protector, who favours her elder half-sister, Lady Mary, the future (Catholic) queen. William Cecil, a rising royal secretary, is protective towards ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has something to do with virtue. ‘A complete whore’ is the way the victim was described by Lady Victoria Hervey, a socialite who once dated Andrew and later appeared on Love Island.‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Giuffre writes, ‘but I felt I had to.’ All the pomp, tradition, ceremony and ‘loyalty’ in the world can’t wash ...”

“... festivities before journeying on. The lord shares the bounty of his daily hunt; meanwhile, the lady of the castle tries to seduce Gawain each morning. He honourably refuses to betray his host’s hospitality.On the last day before he is due to face the knight, Gawain partially succumbs to the lady and accepts her ...”

“... being a housewife’, but he is soon making preparations to move on. The last words his forsaken lady says to him are those an aspiring hero most dreads. ‘You know?’ she asks him. ‘Something I didn’t kind of see you as? You’re a coward.’ There is a political point, as well as an emotional one, in Raban’s use of a defective quest as the literary ...”