“... nouveau riche; a ragged fisher-boy; that African lad and a jester in blackface; a crazy old lady in the local and a posh little girl’s impeccable young nurse: he does his utmost to catch every eye and achieve an understanding. From which, I read decency into Hals. The prevailing smiliness suggests he’s been venturing wisecracks. But if they fail to ...”

“... The Water Babies (1863), the chimney-sweep Tom meets the last great auk, a ‘very grand old lady’ sitting on ‘Allalonestone’ who tells the story of their extinction before weeping tears of pure oil. It’s revealing – if not surprising – that the grief is attributed to a maiden aunt. If male scientists felt grief at the idea of ...”

“... loop, Rita Tushingham, who played Jo in the film of A Taste of Honey, creates the part of the old lady. The maths teacher is Toby Jones, who has spoken of the importance of radio plays, of the early pleasure of listening to them in the dark. Delaney – born within two years of another fluent radio dramatist, Angela Carter – grew up when radio was the ...”

“... cast of bourgeoisie. The appearance of public togetherness disguised a reality wherein the titled lady dismissed the wife of a city merchant and the wealthy Yorkshire gentleman rarely conversed with a lord. Vauxhall might have resembled an enchanted wood, but prince and pauper knew their place, even in ...”

“... his name as Cecil Graham, which Wilde was to use twenty years later as the name of a character in Lady Windermere’s Fan. He knew of Fanny and Stella, having read an account of their exploits in a pornographic work from which McKenna quotes with a certain relish. The arrest was a worrying moment for John Fiske, the American consul in Edinburgh, whose love ...”

“... a real genius could write even more heartfelt poetry, and have an even more ardent army of young lady (and gentleman) worshippers. How inspired were Canning’s speeches; but how much more inspiration could be generated by someone with greater insight into the clash of social forces and greater skill in managing the newspapers! How Napoleon had ...”

“... Punishment (Jill Churchill) makes it plain that Shelley is not guilty of murdering the cleaning lady in her kitchen because, as her friend Jane says, ‘If you were going to kill somebody, you’d do it where you wouldn’t have to clean up afterwards.’ Horsfield has also devoured better-known works like Cranford, in which house-proud ladies, on acquiring ...”

“... In Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall the society woman who ships girls to Rio is called Lady Metroland. Her husband, Viscount Metroland, takes his ‘funny name’ (as Paul Pennyfeather sees it) from a fantasy fiefdom of the London Metropolitan Railway, an advertising man’s conceit which tickled the imagination of the public in the 1920s ...”

“... When​ Marie-Antoinette couldn’t sleep, she would ring for a lady-in-waiting to come and read to her; a rota of lectrices was on call at Versailles at any time of day or night; before radio or talking books, this was one of the luxuries of the Ancien Régime. The queen could have lit her bedside candle and read to herself, but it wasn’t just a rich woman’s indolence that made that remedy less appealing ...”

“... the crusader were joined, much to her parents’ chagrin. ‘I was brought up, my mother hoped, a lady,’ de Mille wrote, ‘and ladies, my father knew, did not dance.’ Agnes at first wanted to be an actress. ‘I practised acting every night in bed – dreadful scenes of having both my legs amputated, dying at the scaffold, coming upon the family ...”

“... According to one female patient, his ‘beautiful small white hands were the envy of many a lady’. His insistence that his body not be examined after his death confirmed the impression that he had something to hide. It requires an ‘overlarge draft on human credulity’, Stoker wrote, to imagine that cross-dressing women in the military went ...”

“... capable of helping them; and if the stranger who offered his help was a good skater, and if the lady could not skate at all, the help given was so material that a feeling of gratitude was the result, and acquaintance, and possibly an undesirable acquaintance, was thus formed in a way wholly contrary to the recognised social rules.’ I like to think of ...”

“... has not transformed the academic world to an extent that makes a book championing Victorian lady mediums look like the safest way of securing a reputation as a historian. The risks have paid ...”

“... whose job satisfaction seems to be derived from obstructing the public. There used to be a lady called Vera, employed to receive orders for photocopies in the Lenin Library. She could always find some excuse to turn down a book: it was too old, or it was in a special collection, or it simply couldn’t be copied. She had learnt to refuse my books as ...”

“... Bart – comes from the same family as Celia Fiennes, that admirable ‘fine’ lady of Banbury Cross, who rode side-saddle about 17th-century England, visiting one stinking ‘spaw’ after another and crisply recording all she saw. He became a baronet while still in the womb, for his father, commanding the Scots Greys in Italy, was killed ...”