“... irritating about this presentation of the past as a giant Miss Universe pageant, with a lady-pleasing subsection for dishy gents, is that tucked away within it, and relatively unexplored, are some interesting propositions. One of them Professor Marwick puts with, I trust, calculated banality: ‘if it was a woman’s duty to be beautiful, could a ...”

“... had eight children, one of whom married Stanford White’s only child Lawrence. This Chanler lady, if you remember, became ‘Mama’ – Lessard’s grandmother with the second-generation liquid jewel/wine face. The Chanlers were amusing and artistic as well as classy. Some were painters, sculptors and musicians; all could write a sonnet at the drop of ...”

“... take it or leave it. That’s what shows in Frank O’Hara’s great poem of 1959, ‘The Day Lady Died’, when he buys himself a hamburger and a malted and ‘an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days’. Subsequently, foreign titles had something of the status of evidence, or alibi: an increasingly mendacious and ...”

“... chiefly those of Kipling and James, as well as (almost inevitably, one feels) Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ and James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. Hardy, Hemingway and Lawrence are given some close attention, too, and so is Elizabeth Bowen’s only famous story, ‘Mysterious Kôr’. At one point Bayley remarks, almost in incidental ...”

“... including some juxtapositions of a Church of Ireland bishop with a stotious boarding-house lady which might have fitted into The Old Boys, or The Boarding-House. Trevor’s precisions and indirections are impressively matched in David Profumo’s Sea Music, a first novel which restricts itself to a summer holiday in the early Fifties (a few years ...”

“... people in Hollywood on the hurtfulness in the South of a maid being referred to as ‘a coloured lady’. The polite thing was to call her ‘a coloured maid’. Bessie, the Faithful Bessie of Margaret Mitchell’s household, was Ever-Faithful and didn’t mind at all about the Klu Klux Klan on account of Miz Peggy being so busy. As to the peculiar method of ...”

“... but one is not quite sure how much these assessments of character have been influenced by Lady Falkender’s guide and mentor. In seeking to assess Tony Benn’s potential as a future Labour prime minister, she writes that his fantasy concerns the rule of the ordinary man but an ordinary man transformed into a superhuman of sparkling ...”

“... was indeed ruled by the wish not to change and to keep things as they are (shades of the Ricardian lady and her boar). I should never have dreamt of giving such a simple explanation myself, for fear of being accused of Gallocentrism. But I am beginning to wonder, now that my trip has been marked by a return to primary values, whether the explanation does not ...”

“... a party here says she’s for Hungerford.’ In this context, ‘party’ meant a funny old lady, but it was a suitable term for my grandmother, who carried an atmosphere of festivity around with her. She loved popular tunes and at any period of her life would be ‘mad about’ some contemporary hit – from The Belle of New York, The Merry ...”

“... sleep in a cat’s basket. Even at the age of 20 – the year of her personal crisis as a young lady – she could hardly manage stairs. She may have reached a height of two feet. She has a tiny safe income, until the crash comes. She might be a toy, an object, a mere collector’s oddity but for the fact that she is aggressive, rash, sharp-tongued and ...”

“... Cornucopias of fruit and vegetables disgorge within a general herbaceousness. An ancient lady ‘yanked at some convolvulus that threatened to smother the phlox’. Indoors, ‘potted pelargoniums shed their yellowing leaves over the piles of pamphlets and Country Lifes. A budgie clawed at the bars of its cage; demijohns of home-made wine were busy ...”

“... were being made to drip-feed £990 million into BL. There is a nice picture of the Iron Lady attending a Leyland lunch in 1979. ‘Well, Michael Edwardes, why should we pour further funds into British Leyland?’ she asked, and then ‘glared stonily around the table at each of us in turn’. It was, apparently, a disastrous occasion – until a ...”

“... constantly cross-fertilised with his bibliographical and archaeological studies: the mutilated Lady Chapel sculptures at Ely, for example, could at last be recognised as illustrating not canonical but Apocryphal scenes, and his immersion in these byways of legend gave him a special perspective when dealing with medieval manuscripts, wall-paintings or ...”

“... taken by one of his many Hungarian hangers on. Alex was in his late fifties when he made Alexa, Lady Korda. She was in her early twenties, about five years older than Michael. What follows is the discreet but engaging story of an uneasy triangle in which all the parties come into sharp life. Alex should not have married again. He knew it, but he was lonely ...”

“... start by denying the fact was no more than the code of a gentleman then required: the honour of a lady might not be impugned, however dubious her claim to that status. To sue newspapers, as he did, for printing the truth was ill-judged and worse, but it followed necessarily from the original lie. To admit that lie in public and in Parliament, to resign seat ...”