“... as did Byron. Very clever, he got a scholarship to Heidelberg where he acquired his doctorate.’ Lady Mosley burbled on in this vein for a bit, spicing things up with references to Goebbels’s ‘inspired oratory’. Concerning Kristallnacht she was scrupulously non-judgmental, concluding that ‘his guilt must rest on supposition.’ I remember wondering ...”

“... in the kitchen, but this time our Norwich kitchen in St Giles Street – about Comus and the Lady. Why was the Lady stuck to the chair in Milton’s masque? I said it had to be sex – she was unconsciously attracted to her would-be seducer. Wasn’t there some gluey substance involved? Lorna snorted with derision at ...”

“... later: ‘Don’t set yourself down as a failure till you see how we children turn out.’ To Lady Mary Murray, wife of Gilbert Murray, the Professor of Greek at Oxford, the blinkered undergraduate seemed to have gone too far in claiming that the crisis was worse for him than for his mother, whom he had supported in a deplorably inadequate way. ‘You ...”

“... Harris’s actions, for it was clear, even to those who did not warm to her, that Mrs Harris was a lady whose behaviour was so impeccable that she expected no less of others. Mrs Harris did not drink beer or smoke marijuana. But she did something else. On the night of 10 March 1980, Mrs Harris took a gun, got into her car, drove for five hours to ...”

“... gentleman farmer, Mr Boldwood. Six years later, James would begin work on The Portrait of a Lady. The repressed similarity of plot is immediately striking. A beautiful young woman, Isabel Archer, is pursued by three suitors: the dashing, reliable Lord Warburton; the dashing, demonic Gilbert Osmond; and a relentless, even fanatical American industrialist ...”

“... on Browning’s post-marital ‘scutcheon, his tactless proposal, as it was held to be, to Louisa, Lady Ashburton.4 Virginia Surtees, following William Whitla, has argued that it was Lady Ashburton who proposed to Browning, and now she has discovered what amounts to conclusive proof that it was so. But if one instance of ...”

“... hierarchy by raising standards of behaviour among the poor. ‘Charity is the calling of a lady; the care of the poor is her profession,’ she wrote in her novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife. It was by becoming a professional carer for the poor that she came to enjoy the perks of being a lady. ‘How varied is my ...”

“... 18th-century Roman art in England. One English nun is recorded, Mary Montagu, the granddaughter of Lady Mary. Many merchants travelled in Italy, some of them settling permanently in Leghorn, Naples, Venice and other port cities. There were also visitors with special interests: vulcanologists who went to see Vesuvius, agronomists such as Arthur Young, and the ...”

“... his parents too. In the absence of any other aristocracy in residence in Dublin, Sir William and Lady Wilde represented a type of grandeur that they had built with their books and their brains, their independence of mind and their high-toned eccentricity. When Wilde describes himself in De Profundis as ‘a lord of language’, he is suggesting that this ...”

“... of Arthur, the first Tudor prince. There are only glimpses of her in these years: ‘my lady Margaret of Clarence’. When she reached her teens, a marriage was arranged with Richard Pole, a modest landowner with solid Tudor connections, who had been rewarded for loyalty by being made constable of several Welsh castles. The date of the marriage is ...”

“... Polly – aged 16 – is brought, via Darlington, York and Helperby, to visit someone called Lady Celia, who keeps open house for artists and writers. Polly takes the place for a madhouse, and not surprisingly: Lady Celia encourages artistic behaviour in her guests. A Mr Thwaite, mysteriously present at Aunt ...”

“... donations, but tokens of esteem, and she reciprocated, sending gifts from her farms: ‘my Lady Cornwall’ was given eight muscovy duck eggs and Ursula Vaughan received ‘a baskitt of apricocks’. These sociable exchanges were at least as important to the servants who trundled back and forth with the presents as they were to the recipients: tips ...”

“... New Yorkers acting like the most abject stage-door Johnnies, and indeed Janes. The former First Lady sat in the main booth with her friends, looking serene and detached, while all sorts of people took their time collecting their hats or whatever, and rubbernecking shamelessly.What was this? It was more than fame and more than glamour. And it was a bit less ...”

“... to her own sinister froideur, but Decca’s Hons and Rebels turned the mildly eccentric Lord and Lady Redesdale (he took his mongoose to work to catch rats; she wouldn’t countenance anything made from pork) into braying grotesques. True, Nancy’s novels hadn’t helped, but they at least pretended to be fiction. Decca, by virtue of her moral courage and ...”

“... by an anonymous donation of £40,000 from someone who wished only to be known as ‘a patriotic lady’. The Westminster Gazette duly ran a cartoon depicting Christina and John Bull embracing under the heading ‘Something has turned up.’ Unlike his friends John Singer Sargent and Edmund Gosse, James does not seem to have contributed to the fund to save ...”