“... 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 ...”

“... coat and dress by Anna Valentine. I know that because I was peeping out of the window and heard a lady from the Daily Mail say so into her mobile phone while she stalked the pavement outside. We were about to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth, and of course the royals were late, and we, the curtain twitchers of Bloomsbury, had been ...”

“... came into question. An archery expert was one of many who remarked that ‘undoubtedly the young lady would be injured were she to shoot as posed.’ The sculpture of Diana at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2017. In 2013 she was regilded, a process that took five months and 180 square feet of gold leaf. Even though she was refinished according to ...”

“... than the ‘marble or … bronze repose’ ascribed to Yeats’s religious images. In ‘Our Lady of Youghal’, a lost ivory plaque of the Madonna and Child lies underground but appears to orchestrate its own dazzling rediscovery (‘inside a tower of leaves,/the virgin’s almond shrine, its ivory lids parting /behind lids of gold, bursting out of the ...”

“... royal menagerie in an enclosure with a polished parquet floor (‘truly the boudoir of a little lady’, the keeper wrote) and Parisians, filing past to see her in their thousands, went giraffe-crazy. Shops filled with giraffe porcelain, soap, wallpaper, cravats, giraffe-print dresses; the colours of the year were ‘Giraffe belly’, ‘Giraffe in ...”

“... both of the Old Masters and the Moderns: Degas’s The La Danseur, Vermeer’s Young Lady Adorning Herself with Pearls (And Why Not?), Toulouse-Lautrec’s La Belle Epigue and Botticelli’s The Birth of You Know Who. A personal favourite is Jan Van Eyck’s The Marriage of Froggo Amphibini and Giopiggi Porculini, an inferior version of which is ...”

“... to avail itself of the novelist’s feeling for life, issuing in poems like ‘Portrait of a Lady’ which preserved the essence of a novelist’s acumen much as the dramatic monologue preserved the essence of drama. Wilson’s enterprise is a deft turn: infusing the current novel, elsewhere so schematic and teachable, with the specificities and energies ...”