“... the coffee boil over while groping the chambermaid: ‘Carry up your Coffee boldly, and, when your Lady finds it too weak, and examines you whether it has not run over, deny the Fact absolutely; swear you put in more Coffee than ordinary … because your Mistress had Ladies with her.’ What would Vanessa have made of ...”

“... Cornwell) was an Australian gold rush millionaire, nicknamed ‘Princess Midas’ and ‘the Lady of the Nuggets’, who purchased the Sunday Times seemingly on a whim and installed her lover as editor. She also established the Ladies Kennel Association in 1895, a challenge to the authority of the male-only Kennel Club. (The duchess of Newcastle was ...”

“... how to play with children? You are mad, we can no longer have you here. You must go.’ Maybe this lady could be offered a job as a publisher’s reader, or a fiction ...”

“... prostitute called Pacifica. The even more extraordinary Miss Goering – the other serious lady of the title – develops, despite her fabulous wealth, into the most unlikely gangster’s moll ever. The two friends meet again towards the end of the novel in a New York restaurant as Miss Goering waits for her thuggish paramour to conclude some shady ...”

“... book, tracing her fascination to a Vogue profile in June 2001, which stressed the First Lady’s lack of pretension and disdain for fashion, and to a New York Times article in October 2002 that quoted respectful comments by American writers and historians, including Justin Kaplan and David Levering Lewis, who had participated in literary gatherings ...”

“... favourite expression, ‘the family that slays together stays together’, was meant in a Lady Macbeth sort of way (previously Tassie had heard ‘sleighs’ for ‘slays’), she’s impressed, and provides a gloss: ‘Where life was meagre, where the tables were only half full, the comic triumph of the poor was the useful demi-lie. Jokes were ...”

“... programme in which argumentative people seek to broadcast their disputes in front of a wise lady or a baying audience. I’m a Celebrity … Get Me out of Here! will be on later, followed by a documentary about Peter Andre, a previous contestant on I’m a Celebrity who recently split up with the nation’s most frightening glamour girl, Jordan. ITV2 ...”

“... she is all ambition and lies; just as without all the marabou fans, she is just a naked lady with a better than average pair of legs. Frankel’s thoroughness is admirable, considering how difficult Gypsy herself made it to find out the facts of her life. Frankel tells of the dolphin-shaped handles on the basin in Gypsy’s bathroom, the ...”

“... in Alabama schools. Six million poor children got health insurance when Hillary was first lady. She persuaded George W. Bush to give New York $20 billion after 9/11 and took care of the first responders’ respiratory problems. Her tenure as secretary of state was reduced to an overnight trip to Israel from South-East Asia to wrangle a ceasefire after ...”

“... British Isles. She eventually ran her quarry to earth in a cottage in North Yorkshire, home of a lady born to the not very Gallic surname of Parry-Jones, who had a treasured cache of family documents in a trunk that had come to rest there after a sojourn in Chile. Another great dossier of papers was discovered in a château in Périgord. Now, after ...”

“... girl falls for a creepy borderline paedophile. A disabled woman forces the arms of a dead old lady she has never met into silk funeral clothes, hears a crack, thinks she has probably broken one. Sansan, an ageing English teacher, ‘Miss Casablanca’ (because, romantically inclined, she teaches the film time after time), the daughter of a woman who sells ...”

“... a devoted family man. In that respect, he resembled Chekhov, and Chekhov’s masterpiece ‘The Lady with the Dog’ is in a sense in the background of the novel he hoped would be his own masterpiece. Of Mortal Love was published in 1936, the story of a casual love affair that turns into the real thing. Katherine Mansfield, who had deeply admired ...”

“... where the rector’s wife dumped him on the housekeeper or butler while she confabulated with the Lady Bountiful at the Great Hall. There was some basis to Jeeves country, and PG himself was like Jane Austen and many other people in having some grand though distant connections at one end and ordinary humble ones at the other. None of that seems to have ...”

“... the monstrousness of mass unemployment on starvation levels of relief. Somehow the spectacle of Lady Astor seeking to instruct penniless women in the art of making a nourishing soup out of hot water and a few carrots seemed even more offensive than plain indifference. Needless to say, such moments were fairly rare, since a good deal of Parliamentary ...”

“... equal political rights with men, feminists often regard it with scepticism. Yet both the career of Lady Diana Spencer, and Angela Levin’s study of the Princess’s father and stepmother – a classic of its kind – demonstrate that, at this level at least, female influence deserves analysis. Raine Spencer (recently transformed into a French Countess) was ...”