“... the Dead Sea, offered genuine relief to the semi-disabled. Thanks to the Maple furniture heiress, Lady Weigall, Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire achieved social distinction in the Belle Epoque; the patroness always took the last two coaches of the Boston-London train for herself and her servants. The mansion she built for herself became the officers’ mess for ...”

“... of a married woman until the mid-19th century. Before that point, it meant something like ‘boss lady’, a female honorific, indicating authority. Some words that now feel firmly gendered originally had another meaning. ‘Vagina’ meant the scabbard of a sword. I could not hate this more. The idea that it is a protective casing for a phallic weapon feels ...”

“... happy work situation for herself by going to sit and talk for a number of hours a day with an old lady in shelter care. She loved that, and then home for a bath and supper. ‘What’s on the box? Not a lot. On the radio? Not a lot. Right, get out your book.’ Mrs Bright’s resources, like those of a surprising number of retired people, had no truck with ...”

“... advised him to do some reading over the summer in preparation for his teaching), and another lady, Sylva Norman, whose literary ambitions he assisted. Teaching was as much a success in Oxford as it had been in Japan: he got on with his pupils and took great trouble over them. Divorced and remarried, he settled down happily, acquiring a reputation as a ...”

“... his back touching it, was served by white-gloved footmen, and for the first and last time took a lady to dinner in a grand procession (he did not know which arm to take, and still doesn’t). Lord Hastings was strict but fair; he discouraged fooling about at cricket; he stopped tutor and son playing football among his Chinese urns; and he tolerated only ...”

“... we are told, relished the company of sophisticated old ladies and he had an unbounded esteem for Lady Tennyson, as well as ‘adoring’ her children. He made a point of cultivating his friends’ wives. It is possible he remained a bachelor because of his epileptic attacks (which he covered up well), or even because of the maladie d’ amour he picked up as ...”

“... objects – a guinea for the King and a Jew’s harp for the bishop – while beside them a lady and gentleman, or rather a teapot and a periwig, engage in a tête à tête. This, Uglow points out, is still the language of the emblem book, where images stand, hieratically, for ideas. By 1762, in Five Orders of Periwigs, the process is reversed, objects ...”

“... tenderly, or drily. Julia watches a bloody duel fought over her, with the courteous interest of a lady at a medieval tournament, from what appears, surreally, to be the window of a public bathhouse. This puzzling scene provides a turning-point to the drama, for it is followed by the one drawing of a tête-à-tête between the lovers – a misnomer, since her ...”

“... and similar impossibles’, but then he was writing to Aunt Laura, who was reading Portrait of a Lady and may have indicated that the going was getting rough. In Aspects of the Novel (1927) Forster gave several pages to The Ambassadors, and showed that he thought it quite possible but stingy – an instance of James’s premise, according to Forster’s ...”

“... seven young men named Snowball, which started a giggle that swiftly died away. Having read about Lady Ottoline and Garsington young Barry decided to become a conscientious objector, which to his great surprise rather impressed the grim headmaster, Mr Sutcliffe, and resulted in our hero’s being able to stroll past rigid platoons of classmates, ‘their ...”

“... own name. Chamfort was the illegitimate son of Jacqueline de Vinzelles, an aristocratic married lady from the region of Clermont-Ferrand, and a young canon at the cathedral. He was dumped on a baker’s wife, whose own baby had died, and given the dead baby’s name: Sebastien Roch Nicolas. Brilliant as a schoolboy, tormented by rage and resentment when he ...”

“... Nancy said to me after the show as we waited for an armed guard to escort us to her car. ‘Lady, you have balls!’ In New York the next morning, I ended the tour with an appearance on Crossfire, a public-affairs programme on which two antagonists duke it out, each with her very own hostile interviewer; as a friend remarked, it’s like being locked in ...”

“... edge of the wood, the dermatologist said, ‘extracting nourishment from the legs of unsuspecting lady passengers. Men were never affected, their stouter nether garments providing sufficient protection. The tram was disinfected, the grooves were planed out … the epidemic came to an end.’ In 2008, bugs were found on the New York subway, on wooden benches ...”

“... a pendant to one of the greatest of European portraits. (Unfortunately the painting, bequeathed by Lady Eastlake to the National Gallery, was destroyed in the flood of 1928 at the Tate Gallery, to which it had been transferred.) It illustrates the taste – not just for Raphael but for Guido Reni – against which the Pre-Raphaelites rebelled, but it also ...”

“... a Jewish husband, ‘hates’ Israel.And of course Trump had to bring up the cats. Vance’s cat lady crack wasn’t going away, so the Republicans had demonstrated their cat-loving credentials by creating the completely false story that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing cats off the front porches of real Americans and eating them. This ...”