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“... engagement, women’s a slovenly lack of self-restraint. Ever since The Rivals (1775), where Lady Slattern ‘cherishes her nails for the purpose of making marginal notes’ in circulating-library romances, it’s been a commonplace to assume that (as Thackeray put it) ‘much may be learned with regard to lovely woman by a look at the book she reads in ...”

“... her to a tea shop for a snack and Virginia Woolf was sitting at the next table. (Neither great lady deigned to acknowledge the other.) And not long ago I met an elderly female couple – two very elegant Syrian women – who had lived for many years in Paris on the rue Jacob, across from the house in which the flamboyant lesbian writer and expatriate ...”

“... was persuaded.’ By the Twenties, she had become enthralled by the glamour and political clout of Lady Astor, the Conservative MP who raised money from the rich for McMillan’s causes. Dedicating to Astor – with the epigraph ‘Party is not enough’ – the ‘Life’ she wrote of her own sister Rachel, McMillan concluded her political career with an ...”

“... worthy and more extraordinary. Washington recapitulates the story as told in the books of Lady Emily Lutyens and her daughter Mary, both deeply involved in it, to the dismay of Lady Emily’s husband, the architect Edwin Lutyens. Krishnamurti, son of an Indian Theosophist hangeron, was picked up on a Madras beach by ...”

“... limited-edition collector’s items that this book describes? In Britain it was not until the Lady Chatterley trial that ‘the masses’ were permitted to read a work formerly deemed pornographic. The celebrated question posed by the prosecution counsel – ‘would you be willing for your wives or servants to read this book?’ – reminds us of the ...”

“... out merely to be ‘mashed bananas and chunky peanut butter’. He first masturbated while reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover – a classy vehicle to inaugurate the venerable habit. Art-historical parlour game: hypothesise the circumstances of the first time Cézanne masturbated. (Or Nadar. Or Duchamp. Or Arbus.) Not yet sexually self-aware, Mapplethorpe ...”

“... a new problem. A parable has it that a cosmologist was approached after a lecture by an old lady, who informed him that what he had spoken was great nonsense, because she knew that the earth rested on the back of a huge turtle. Then on what, the cosmologist asked, did the turtle stand? Why, another, even bigger turtle, came the reply. But what ...? The ...”

“... there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?’ So says Lady Thomasina Coverly, the heroine of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, to her tutor Septimus Hodge. Her question was echoed a century after her (fictitious) life by the unorthodox biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose mathematical investigations of the living ...”

“... been missed. The discussion of Colbert and the arts draws heavily on an excellent old monograph by Lady Emilia Frances Dilke: some readers might have liked to know that Lady Frances (née Strong) was once the wife of Mark Pattison, and was widely believed to be the original of George Eliot’s Dorothea Casaubon. The First ...”

“... and go to Innisfree, and plant nine bean rows there, is chided for preferring to take tea with Lady Gregory. He is not. For the serendipitous, there are quaint facts in plenty. The first man suspended for saying ‘damn’ in the Commons seems to have been that flamboyant Scot, Cunninghame Graham, then Liberal Member for South Lanark. Lord Vansittart is ...”

“... although not by everybody, held to have been worsted by Miss Elizabeth Anscombe, a young lady who smoked cigars, combined Roman Catholicism with logical positivism, and was on her way to becoming Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Lewis himself wrote to a friend, Dom Bede Griffiths, that Miss Anscombe had completely demolished his specific ...”

“... to live with her much of the time while in flight from his second wife ‘La’, who had been born Lady Ursula Chetwynd-Talbot, a descendant of Shakespeare’s Talbot of the Hundred Years War. Although Nigel Jones makes rather a thing of regarding her as a femme fatale, and Patrick as an abject snob for wanting to marry her, it sounds more innocent and ...”

“... How does someone of Doris Lessing’s uncompromising intelligence turn into a little old lady? Not easily, especially if body conspires with mind in refusing to retire gracefully. ‘Most men and more women – young women afraid for themselves – punish older women with derision, punish them with cruelty, when they show inappropriate signs of sexuality ...”

“... about English social class, undermines preconceptions with unobtrusive relish. Cicely, a modern lady of the manor, impulsively rescues an elderly couple having a miserable picnic on a busy lay-by, and sweeps them away for an afternoon’s entertainment in her very sophisticated garden. Cicely is generous and cultivated: so is her family. Arnold and Gladys ...”

“... their fear of authority figures – immigration inspectors, a doctor’s receptionist, a lollipop lady – leads them to trust the wrong people: Avtar hands over his passport to a man who’s giving him work, and never sees it again. The competition they find themselves reduced to is degrading for everyone, but clinging to each other, as Randeep clings to ...”