“... 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 ...”

“... so that any charger advancing that far would trap its hooves in spokes. It is a great pity that Lady Butler was never able to do justice on canvas to a battle-scene like this. As it turned out, the two world wars offered small scope for wheelmen, but Dodge does well to note the part played by the bicycle in the Japanese advance on Singapore and by the ...”

“... the House of Lords, once exclaimed in grief: ‘I agree with everything said by the noble Baroness Lady Blackstone – a fate I never thought would befall me.’ He will not suffer that fate for much longer (provided Baroness Blackstone follows the Labour Party’s proposed education policy). Labour’s draft manifesto, New Labour: New Life For ...”

“... the Oscar Wilde trial,’ Ashley comments on Corbett v. Corbett in her 2006 memoir, The First Lady, ‘had a civil matter led to such socially disastrous consequences.’ For Justice Ormrod, the case – ‘the first occasion on which a court in England has been called on to decide the sex of an individual’ – was straightforward. Because Ashley had ...”

“... we never know. But his next step was to enter into a contract of marriage with his ward, Elizabeth Lady Lisle, whose title he had taken. Elizabeth was only eight but she was an heiress and the move took her off the market till she grew up, giving Charles the use of her resources. As long as the marriage was unconsummated, Charles could free himself if he found ...”

“... in a single mono-polylogue Mathews would appear successively as serving girl, little boy and grand lady, or Ap Leeks the Welsh gardener and Béchamel the French chef, not to mention the dashing young Captain Grapnell, RN. ‘All the characters are united,’ as one of his playbooks explained, ‘and Mr Mathews has full scope for the versatility of his talents ...”

“... at trifles can just skip the offending stories and focus on the edifying ones. In short, ‘the lady who is forever saying her prayers or baking … cakes for her confessor should leave my tales alone.’ This is Boccaccio’s greatest contribution to literary theory: vernacularity, writing for entertainment, reader responsibility and the autonomy of ...”

“... two women in the narrator’s life (he refers to his wife as ‘Madam’ and to his lover as ‘my Lady’) have encountered one another with good grace, each afterwards praising to him the attributes of the other: Now, Madam’s faulty feature is a glazed And inaccessible eye, that has soft fires, Wide gates, at love-time only. This admires My ...”

“... mind ‘unforced’. (The first draft was written in a philosophy class and called ‘The Bored Lady’ – the eventual title was ‘Ennui’.) Though simpler, it wasn’t very different from the later poems that would lead Eliot to place her ‘among the half-dozen most “exciting” contemporary European and American poets’. Asked about the poem’s ...”

“... his prime’ At three score ten. But money was not time. ‘I am a mixture of Santa Claus, Lady Bountiful, the Good Samaritan, Baron Richthofen, J.P. Morgan, Casanova. I am tender as a woman, brave as a lion, and can fight like a cat.’ This is the way Charles E. Merrill described himself. In truth, his considerable generosity notwithstanding, he was ...”