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“... In one of George Eliot’s Scenes from Clerical Life a lady addicted to reading tracts skims rapidly over references to Zion or the River of Life, but has her attention immediately caught by any mention of ‘pony’ or ‘boots and shoes’. A reader of modern biographies can see why. The best things in them are usually the facts, the objects, the unexplained and inexplicable things that cluttered up the lives of the august and famous, as they do everybody else’s, and now find a place in the story ...”

“... well:I can do no better at this stage than describe my own punishment chamber, which I call the Lady Chapel.   This is not blasphemy on my part. It is a chapel to the Lady (the Lady I serve) in her aspect as Aphrodite Philomastrix. It is a room dedicated to the use of the birch-rod ...”

“... Private Eye and jail its editor, Richard Ingrams – an effort which was supported by Wilson and Lady Falkender, both victims of Ingrams’s harassment, and which petered out in a relatively painless settlement in 1976? Ingrams’s theory is that there was such a connection. Goldsmith is no great exporter (France is without Marmite) and the ecologist is his ...”

“... cunning she dissembles this passion, writing to her close friend back home that she has met a lady called Simonetta Perkins who is in the same predicament, and what advice should she be given? The comedy is delicate and poignant too, with an anti-climactic climax of droll simplicity. Minor characters are masterfully etched, in particular a just-married ...”

“... child Jesus lived had been transported by angels in three stages to Loreto in Italy. (Today, Our Lady of Loreto is the patron saint of airline pilots.) In Dublin he would find himself drawn into raucous nationalist politics; in England he felt himself travestied, reviled and belittled. All of this Newman’s Unquiet Grave portrays in superbly incisive ...”

“... is sometimes also used for Jessica, who is mainly Decca but sometimes Squalor. Nancy is French Lady but sometimes just Lady; in everyday settings she answers to Naunce or Naunceling. Lady Redesdale is The Poor Old Female or Fem and her husband is most often Farve. Diana is sometimes ...”

“... whatever, like the exploding manhole covers of Skopje. How open was it? To here a former first lady, the victims were visited too and down there for ten days without a punchline. He’s only got seven kids and none of these are tea drinkers. Restrictions led the way, then grunge too passed, leaving a dimpled wake much prized by amateurs. What to ...”

“... hippy baby-sitter (high on Speed) who cooks the baby instead of the Christmas turkey. Or the old lady who shampoos her poodle and puts it to dry in the microwave oven. Or the take-away chicken that turns out to be a finger-lickin’ rat. Or the Porsche that’s on sale for 50 dollars (Mr Average has run away with his secretary leaving his wife instructions ...”

“... in.) When, I ask myself, did the last parlourmaid work in the streets around our house? The old lady who lived next door to us said that Lady Kingscliffe (there is a Kingscliffe Gardens in the neighbourhood) had a parlourmaid who had morning and afternoon uniforms. Did our own terraced house have such a grand ...”

“... in virginal white, waiting in her borrow’d likeness of shrunk death. Christopher Kane’s Lady Macbeth crouches in an evening gown, her hands full of red petals, looking more like Shelley’s beloved heaping rose leaves on the bed. If only it were Fuseli’s Lady Macbeth seizing the bloody daggers (his Titania and ...”

“... your own reading and to think about street children then and now. Stand Coachman, or the Haughty Lady Well Fitted shows what is said to be a true incident. A lady refused to move her coach which was blocking the path, so a man opened the door, climbed in and made his way out the other side, followed by ‘the mob ...”

“... but the characters in Poor Things are talking only about a single word in a well-known scene. A lady asks another character in the Wilde play about his family and he says he doesn’t know who he is by birth. ‘I was … well, found … in a handbag.’ The lady repeats part of the answer as a bewildered question (‘a ...”

“... of Catherine of Valois – wife of Henry V, disinterred during Henry VII’s rebuilding of the Lady Chapel. ‘I did kiss her mouth,’ he wrote in 1669. In 1806, having failed to ‘get’ Nelson after his death (he was buried in St Paul’s), the vergers had a wax effigy of him made and put it on show for sixpence a pop. Later, in 1843, Parliament had to ...”

“... proposal, and the following summer Augusta came to London in need of Byron’s financial help. Lady Oxford had recently ended her affair with the poet and returned to her husband, and Byron could not resist the ‘irreplaceable joy’ offered by his sister. In an account written after the marriage collapsed, Annabella claims that, within hours of their ...”

“... Barrett Browning had become a damsel famed in story. In 1934 Virginia Woolf observed that ‘“Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” is glanced at perhaps by two professors in American universities once a year; but we all know how Miss Barrett lay on her sofa; how she escaped from the dark house in Wimpole Street one September morning; how she met health and ...”