“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... each tear that falls’. However, Empson argues that ‘falst’ is essential to the idea that the lady has a ‘real presence’ in her reflection. I cannot see why you couldn’t believe that while reading ‘falls’, thus avoiding not pedantry or harshness but nonsense. Empson sometimes gets himself into cantankerous fights without necessity; here his ...”

“... Harvest there was an additional problem because, unlike recent fictional diaries such as Nazi Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs ...”

“... cadenza on ‘spooning’, is oddly prophetic of his metaphoric excursuses on intercourse in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, except that it is subversive of its theme. Having taken Emmy home, Gilbert then ‘goes too far’ in the greenhouse; is interrupted by Emmy’s Dickensian father, but escapes. When Mr Bostock discovers who the seducer is, he sends a ...”

“... Augusta Leigh, and contemplating (over a game of billiards) the seduction of the chaste Lady Frances Wedder-burn Webster, while he confided in Lady Melbourne, suavest of older women, about both. The love of women hardly bothers Byron in his last months. His messages even to Teresa Guiccioli, the last ...”

“... Benevolence is a rare Quality among us. Sensibility indeed we have to spare – what novel-reading Lady does not over flow with it to the great annoyance of her Friends and Family – Her own sorrows like the Princes of Hell in Milton’s Pandemonium sit enthroned bulky and vast – while the miseries of our fellow creatures dwindle into pygmy forms, and are ...”

“... to the sanctity of the Aran Islands and the Blasket Islands in Ireland. The attempt by Yeats and Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde to surround the Gaelic past with holiness had loud echoes in the efforts by Catalan architects and artists, from Gaudí to Miró, to establish the Romanesque tradition as quintessentially Catalan while the rest of Spain was ...”

“... Cassandra bequeathed the scant batch of letters she had saved from the flames to her grand-niece, Lady Knatchbull, whose son, Lord Brabourne, had them published – like precious relics – in 1884. A number of other letters have surfaced since then; the great Austen scholar, R.W. Chapman, issued the first modern edition of the correspondence in ...”