“... line which goes nowhere, the statue of the Blessed Virgin standing next door to the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, the squat brick lodge of the Sons of Knute, the statue to the Unknown Norwegian. It is also quite easy to conjure something of the unyielding ferocity of the seasons in the Midwest, the winter which lasts eight months with ...”

“... behind the new-order Greer, who do we take as our role model – Joan Collins or Alan Bennett’s lady in the van? Or, to put it differently, do we or don’t we put in a bid for hormone replacement therapy? (I don’t want to get into difficulties here: Joan Collins swears she’s never had it – she only looks as if she has.) There are reasons for taking ...”

“... Irish ballads bringing tears to the eyes of ladies and gents in London drawing-rooms. His patron Lady Holland encouraged him to write a life of Fitzgerald which would safely sanitise him, for, as Stella Tillyard points out, there had been renewed demands for Catholic emancipation in 1830: it was desirable to depict Lord Edward Fitzgerald in the safe romantic ...”

“... stolen clock. The presentation was made on a February day suffused with ‘greenish vapours’ in Lady Stanley’s cavernous drawing-room, ‘where the fog had also penetrated, and presently from the further end of the room, advancing through the shifting darkness, came Carlyle’. The gift brought out his self-pity in its purest form. ‘What have I to do ...”

“... son ran off with the glamorous transsexual April Ashley it had perhaps forgotten that the first Lady Rowallan had been Alice Polson of Brown and Polson’s cornflour. Today it is celebrities who fill the public gap left by the debs, feeding our insatiable appetite for information about people of no intrinsic interest doing almost nothing. If the gossip is ...”

“... The longest of the letters in this volume contains a small informal essay on The Portrait of a Lady, and Woolson’s admiration for it doesn’t preclude some sharp comments on the novel’s evasiveness when it comes to representing the heroine’s feeling for her future husband. ‘She tells Mrs Touchett that she doesn’t love Lord Warburton; but she ...”

“... nice about Thatcher, recalling that after her first ministerial question time she went into the Lady Members’ room to find Thatcher ironing a dress and was congratulated on her performance: ‘After all,’ the Ironing Lady told Williams, ‘we can’t let them [men] get the better of us.’ In public, however, Thatcher ...”

“... guilt. They wrote to me in London and gave me the gossip, which was normal for life in the Lady Chichester, but hilarious, wilder and more poignant than most everyday goings-on. Pam, after sitting in a cold bath to shrink her Levis in the approved way, had a panic attack, and had to be cut out of her saturated skintight jeans; Sally hadn’t left her ...”

“... set’ loomed large in the police investigation and the press coverage. Defenders of Lady Lucan felt she was frozen out by them; detractors said that her unhappy presence on the club’s ‘widows’ bench’ embarrassed her husband and helped to undermine the marriage.Elisabeth Luard’s impression of the club’s atmosphere as one of ...”

“... never is,’ Maureen said. ‘She’s got a friend in Lawnswood.’‘Sure,’ says Michael. ‘A lady friend.’I said, ‘Stop it, the pair of you, or you’ll do your homework upstairs.’ I can’t bear it when he starts bickering. One minute he’s so grown up, the next he’s back to being ten years old.‘I’m sorry, precious,’ and he puts on his ...”

“... Orianda will never marry the temperate Gerald but he’s unable to see it. In ‘The Handsome Lady’ the widowed Caroline tells the unhappily married John that ‘if there is love between you there is faithfulness, if there is no love there is no fidelity,’ but he’s too slow to take the hint or too worried there would be gossip, and by the time his ...”

“... been locked in a tempestuous on-again, off-again affair for some 12 years. How to tell the grand lady of Coppet what he had done – and how to stage manage the scene that was bound to ensue? He spent most of the summer of 1808 visiting Madame de Staël in Coppet – where she held court during her banishment from Paris by Napoleon – but never summoned up ...”

“... historian’s insistence on evolution. The first poem he has chosen, an epitaph by Elizabeth, Lady Tanfield, is notable partly because it reveals the scope of the research which has gone into the preparation of this anthology (the text is inscribed on Sir Lawrence Tanfield’s tomb in Burton Parish Church), and partly because it is so resolutely ...”

“... of a ‘relation’, and after his death Charles explained that this relation was their mother, Lady Drysdale. Miriam Benn doubts whether tenderness for his mother’s sensibilities can really have been the motive for George’s determined anonymity, on the grounds that Lady Drysdale was quite thick-skinned about sex. I ...”

“... vice-chancellors to stop admitting students whose spelling and grammar are not up to scratch. Lady Blatch, a junior education minister, has called on school examining boards to exclude television programmes from the assessment material for English courses. Behind Mr Patten and Lady Blatch is a powerful group of ...”