“... But it is nothing of the kind. Most of the facts will be familiar to anyone conversant with Lady Donaldson’s study, and most of the gossip is merely being dished up again for the umpteenth time. The author seems unable to decide whether his story is a latterday version of Cinderella, Pygmalion, Gone with the Wind, Hamlet or Othelio. His understanding ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... would point also to the celebratory history by Beveridge’s fellow intriguer, Jessy Mair, later Lady Beveridge. What this ex-director has pulled off, however, cannot be dismissed as dutiful commemoration, still less as score-settling. Dahrendorf’s LSE is a striking achievement, combining standards of detached scholarship with subjective insight in a way ...”

“... first evidence of that MI5 subversion of the Wilson Government dealt with by famous Peter Wright. Lady Falkender and Wilson had urged Goldsmith to sue – Marnham had unwittingly libelled him by saying he was at John Aspinall’s lunch to decide what to do if Lucky turned up. And so on. Goldsmith is discredited, loses a peerage, fails to buy a ...”

“... are obscenity, blasphemy and drugs.’ Holbrook still sees that era – which began with the 1960 Lady Chatterley acquittal and ended with the Gay News prosecution in 1976 – as England’s dark age. ‘Permissive’ and ‘alternative’ remain the dirtiest words in his lexicon; his black beast is dressed in soiled denim, ornamented with hand-crafted ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... college looking for inyenzi. Mukasonga turned this episode into the climax of her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile (2012), which weaves the personal dramas of a group of schoolgirls into a narrative about the disintegration of postcolonial Rwanda. The novel is set in the Lycée Notre-Dame du Nil, a fictionalised version of her own school. The boarders there ...”

“... of human reality is evoked in a wonderful passage from the preface to The Portrait of a Lady:The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million – a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still piercable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the ...”

“... glimpsed only in and through the world of prefabricated ‘types’: Melancholic, Coquette, Merry Lady, Tragic Actress, English Dancer, Our Dear Little Ones. Among the menfolk, there is even a Basque. These are personalities in production, or in performance, and their patent disjointedness leaves us wondering how one might categorise, let alone represent, the ...”

“... Forman wearing a skirt borrowed from a neighbour’; and the weaver Juliette Hamelcourt, once a lady in waiting to Queen Astrid of the Belgians, with her dog under one arm and a bundle of tapestries under the other. The Ansonia – which was turned into a condominium in the 1990s – boasted fewer legends. Musicians were said to like it because the walls ...”