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“... our hands, dark as shadows, silent, we looked on, gravely, at this desperate bereavement. – Dear lady, I fear you’ll never grasp the politics of this. Monsieur Napoleon, that’s his real name, is a prince who worships poverty. He loves servants and palaces, loves hounds, horses, gambling, soft mattresses and at the same time he is saving society, the ...”

“... pale colours. If my mother were alive, Margaret Thatcher’s mock-Georgian Dulwich house and its Lady would be the metaphors made manifest. (Not that she’s like the Lady: she’d think she should straighten up, lose a few pounds, cut the pussy-cat bows.) I wish, then, that the piece of journalism that Beatrix ...”

“... charged with the murder of ten young women since 1971. I’m standing up against this tree, when a lady comes ambling up wrapped in a red scarf. ‘You one of them reporters?’ she says, pressing her lips down, inclining her head, screwing up her eyes. ‘Kind of. Are you one of them locals?’ I say, screwing mine up the same way. She ...”

“... to be ‘not quite a gentleman’; one of them was Lord Rosslyn, but his guest’s ability to make Lady Rosslyn laugh saved the day, and the Rosslyns’ young daughter was won over by the same method. And on and on it goes. Anthony Powell remembers that when they were both staying with the Longfords ‘John made everybody laugh.’ ‘Betch made me ...”

“... the Gaelic culture that their ancestors had been intent on suppressing. Before Yeats’s patron Lady Gregory came to collect folklore in the West of Ireland, her future husband William had been busy drafting the notorious Gregory clause in the depths of the Great Famine, which deprived thousands of relief-seeking small farmers of their paltry piece of land ...”

“... that the man who wrote ‘She walks in beauty like the night’ could also observe (of a different lady, naturally): ‘Her cunt tasted of anchovies.’ However, the remark brutally typifies Byron’s relationships or misrelationships with women, whom he treated very badly. Observing him, in Nye’s version, democratically dropping his breeches for cooks or ...”

“... stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in Dorchester: Tea at Max Gate. Lady Stacie there, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan – and a fashionable lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the tea-table. He shut her up by saying ‘I am not interested in my novels. I ...”

“... women were subject to much knightly attention. The elaborate code of service and subjection to a lady found in courtly love was not just a game. The presence of women in the audience at tournaments spurred men on in their combat with each other, turning this combat into a form of sexual display. Women occasionally took a more active part in chivalry’s ...”

“... view, gives an equal interest to the diary of a Dodd, an Amiel, or a Mabel Barrows, a young lady of 16 who in 1885 was keeping an artless private record at St Margaret’s School in Waterbury, Connecticut. ‘Mabel’, as she liked to be known to her friends – her real name was Mary – had various crushes on her fellow students (‘Carrie and I lay ...”

“... of a learned dining club. One of his stories concerned a don and a colleague, a nervous lady, who were doing the B. Lit. viva of a black man. The male don has a sudden fit, jumps to his feet, shouts, splutters, and turns coal black on the instant. The lady thus abruptly outnumbered runs from the room with outcries ...”

“... attendance as her daughter-in-law’s helpmeet. What could be more idyllic? Quite a lot, it seems. Lady Dorothy, being a Cavendish, made no secret of her loathing for the old lady or of her fast-diminishing marital passion. ‘Harold was not enthusiastic about the grapplings and gropings of the bed,’ Davenport-Hines ...”

“... client, not the stars. Thus he reports that on 16 June 1646 at 19.26 p.m. he was consulted by a lady who had repeatedly turned down a gentleman’s proposals of marriage, and now bitterly regretted it. She was tall, good-looking, blonde, round-faced and cheerful. In no time at all Lilly had discovered (from the stars) that her suitor was ...”

“... Jane’s country-mouse observations on the ball itself – particularly of the dangerous Lady Ashburton, whom she suspected of having designs on that grim organ, Thomas Carlyle’s heart, are hilarious. The halfway-mark volume pivots neatly on the mid-century year, 1850 – the cusp between the horrors of the ‘hungry Forties’ and the Imperial ...”

“... of gender relations, and to the significance in chivalry of ‘courtly love’. ‘To love a lady truly and honourably,’ Charny says, ‘is the right position to be in for those who desire to achieve honour.’ Love, as a force urging a knight forward to test his prowess ever more severely in order to make himself worthy of his beloved, is a recurrent ...”

“... turns to Vermeer. In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Pater remarks of ‘Lady Lisa’ that she is ‘older than the rocks among which she sits’; Ciaran Carson (Fishing for Amber, 1999) feels that the 17th-century Dutch walls in Vermeer’s paintings are ‘as old as Egypt’. As a man Vermeer is little more to us than a ...”