“... Hofmannsthal seemed to oppose the match, Dee wrote: ‘Wish somebody would poison that f––ing Lady L. von H … She has just had a baby stuck in her tubes and I wish to god it had popped her off. But modern science has pulled her through and she is sitting around in feathered bed jackets getting in my way.’ Another of his exes published a book, which ...”

“... his Lennon glasses and streaming down his face. Still, he is in better shape than the bloodied old lady lying flat out on the sidewalk, one eye swollen shut, while everyone else gets an eyeful of the incident.) We were accustomed to viewing the world through a set of conventional lenses that Winogrand wrenched from our face, making us conscious of how ...”

“... A section on women, birds and feathers moves from Cecil Beaton’s designs for My Fair Lady, to Simone de Beauvoir’s novel L’Invitée, to Hitchcock’s The Birds, to Rubens and Correggio’s paintings of Leda and the swan, to Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter collection of 2001, to Wuthering Heights (I’ll stop there). In ‘Pockets, Purses ...”

“... they won’t be another May. How to make that case? By frantically channelling their inner iron lady. ‘Dominic is the male Thatcher,’ Raab’s supporters will tell anyone who’ll listen. ‘Like Thatcher, he is “unyielding”,’ one former cabinet minister said. What this seems to mean is that he will keep hammering away until he gets his way. Raab ...”

“... Sir Wyndham Braddock, ‘His Majesty’s Resident in the Combined Punjab States’, and his wife, Lady Aurelia. ‘Had it been at all possible, Sir Wyndham would have cancelled’ – the ‘situation in the Punjab is worsening’ after Colonel Dyer’s ‘action at Amritsar’. (Could Dyer have foreseen that he would become a stock minor character, not in ...”

“... and a cause of terrible suffering. It preoccupied physicians and the columnists of the Lady’s Magazine in equal proportions.Ray and Hackman, apparently bound together and torn apart by intense and, in Hackman’s case, ultimately ungovernable passion, were a fascinating instance. Both were seen, by many people, as victims: Ray of her ...”

“... saintly mask made to fit his worldly face, by changing his name to George Heaven, and courting his lady all over again. When eventually unmasked, he finds that years of looking and behaving as a saint have transformed illusion into reality. ‘He looked into her eyes and saw in them the reflection of his own ...”

“... about the making of the notorious and hugely profitable pornographic exploration of the lady with the lively larynx. MacKinnon has spent a good portion of her career as a scholar and litigator trying to develop legal and other sanctions against pornography – including having helped Deep Throat star Linda Boreman (Linda Lovelace was a nom de ...”

“... life were May Lyttelton, whose early death had robbed him of an intended bride, and Mary Wyndham, Lady Elcho. May’s brother Alfred was appointed Colonial Secretary, and Mary’s brother George was brought into the Cabinet. Under Balfour, one of his ministers observed, ‘cabinets degenerated into cliquey conversations between “Arthur” and “Bob” and ...”

“... modern literature, the history of cinema, a case of homosexual-style blasphemy (which precedes the Lady Chatterley case), homosexual marriage blessed by autocephalic archbishops, and much else, including in a limited sense the life of Toomey’s creator. Here is, if not exactly God’s plenty, plenty of the Devil. At the age of 14 Toomey is seduced by George ...”

“... of location work is provided, indirectly, by a character in Theroux’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’: He thought: All travellers are like aging women, now homely beauties; the strange land flirts, then jilts and makes a fool of the stranger. There is less risk, at home, in making a jackass of yourself: you know the rules there. The observation is ...”

“... of her front teeth fell out into the snow in front of a firehouse. A fireman came out and said, “Lady can I help you?” “Oh, my pearl,” she said. “I dropped my pearl.”’Throughout her brief, blazing career, Darling worked hard to appear superficial. Her topics of conversation were lipstick, hair, clothes, stockings, stars, men: light, breezy salon ...”

“... daughters, feared for their internal organs. ‘She used to tell us a dreadful moral tale about a lady who laced herself so hard that she cut her liver right in half.’Structural transformations of the figure weren’t limited to the upper half of the body. In the early 18th century there was a vogue for gigantic skirts, which had to be supported by ...”

“... he becomes ‘a modern African man’. She says that his girlfriend, Nko, is ‘a modern African lady, but you are still lagging – oh, so far, far behind!’ Miss Bulewao’s next lesson begins: ‘Today we shall explore the possibility of working on biographical details, to make them look fictitious. Ete Kamba, you have to start ...’ But Ete is not ...”

“... My father crossed himself and laid his pink carnations in Alyosha’s stone arms. The little lady in the headscarf took her tools out of the wheelbarrow and set to work. She scrubbed the marble plinth until we could see our reflections in it, then the marble skirting around the tomb itself. Then she scratched away at the vines and the ivy which were ...”