“... and I was six. The issue was how much of a two-barrel popsicle I was going to share with him. A lady came up to us and said, in German, that she would give us a nickel so that we could each have a treat of our own. I don’t remember buying a second popsicle, but I do remember being very excited at finding someone else of our linguistic species. I rushed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ready to sink as it was. Well, said I, all I can say is, that if it is true, he has used a young lady abominably ill. Austen’s monologists are windy performers, who always enact the opposite of the laws they so like to propose. Mrs Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, may be the funniest example. ‘I do not like to boast of my child,’ she announces, while ...”

“... find a husband is between 22 (fresh out of college) and 27 – after that you become a ‘leftover lady’, meaning you’re too old for an ‘ideal match’. Before 18, any form of puppy love is strictly forbidden, by the school and the parents. For men, the criterion isn’t age: it’s wealth. At weekends public parks in big cities such as Beijing and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Cart – and glancing around the critic’s booklined study, and demonstrating what the erring lady took to be an extreme lack of sensibility, he is supposed to have remarked: ‘Books do furnish a room.’ The narrator thinks neither story is likely to be true, but that makes the nickname all the more irresistible. Drink, sex and scholarship point to one ...”

“... and exposing furtive British moves towards a pact with the Third Reich. A special target was Lady Astor, who was antisemitic and violently hostile to both France and Soviet Russia, Britain’s only plausible allies in a war with Germany. She and Lord Astor, owner of the Times, used the paper to call for negotiations with Hitler. In November ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with cross-dressing in the theatre and fiction, might have influenced the culturally-aware young lady. The theatrical literary quality emerges clearly from the accounts of Nadezhda Durova, a soldier in the Russian wars against Napoleon, known after her initial sortie, by the Tsar at least, to be a woman, although she insisted she was unknown to others, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... apprentice the moment she found an opportunity to become resident housekeeper to the widowed Lady Fetherstonhaugh (who had once been a dairymaid). In Tono-Bungay, Wells has a wickedly funny description of teatime in the housekeeper’s room at Bladesover House, based on one of his rare visits to his mother. Between Wells’s snobbish upper servants and ...”