“... Michelangelo gave to Vittoria Colonna – a pious, aristocratic and extraordinarily well-connected lady – the athletic body becomes the vehicle of pathos, as it was in the pietàs which he carved both at the beginning and at the very end of his career as a sculptor. There are drawings for those here too. In drawings in which the supremely energetic body type ...”

“... presumably a reference to Thatcher’s early incarnation as the ‘Milk Snatcher’, with her Iron Lady years still to come. ‘She looked magnificent,’ our narrator tells us with Alan Clarke awe as Joyce and her cohorts deliver the Scheme’s coup de grâce fifty pages later, ‘and at that moment I realised the future belonged to people like her.’ The ...”

“... in on their own. Thus there’s a painting of Philip IV by Velázquez hung next to Vermeer’s Lady with Her Maid and a self-portrait of Rembrandt in old age; none is lit, they don’t complement one another, and together look like a trio of mud-coloured pictures. It would be more sensible to arrange the collection chronologically: the way it is now, one ...”

“... not take out the minimal insurance of either neutralising the description entirely (the bag lady joke is not so funny as to be indispensable) or drawing on fictional licence and inventing a winner who in no respect (sex, age group, type of novel) could be construed as a slur on Ms Byatt – the jet-lagged Antipodean, for example? Bradbury can mount a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her name in our language is called CREDIT ... ’Tis strange to think how absolute this lady is; how despotically she governs all her actions: if you court her, you lose her, or must buy her at unreasonable rates; and if you don’t discharge her to a tittle of your agreement, she is gone, and perhaps may never come again as long as you live ...”